Christopher Buckley - Wet Work

Charley turned on the video and pressed "play."

On came the Becker Industries corporate logo, the eagle holding the globe, which Tasha said looked like a bird trying to dribble a basketball, followed by footage of the space shuttle hurtling through the upper atmosphere. A few seconds later, there were two loud explosions and the solid-fuel rocket boosters separated from the orbiter and began their slow-motion tumble back to Mother Earth.

The voice-over began: "Originally developed for NASA by Becker Industries, High Mass Explosive, or HMX, represents the state of the art in plastic explosives. Here on earth, HMX has literally hundreds of uses. Lightweight, malleable and detonated exclusively by means of an eighty-five percent nitroglycerin power primer controlled by a two-stage safety microchip-also made by Becker Industries-HMX is the first choice of a growing number of government and civilian agencies. With an explosive power of three million pounds per square inch and a flash velocity of twenty-six thousand feet per minute-nearly twenty times the muzzle velocity of a.38 caliber bullet-it's clear why the professionals turn to HMX."

"This wasn't made for… us?" asked Bundy.

"No," said Charley. "Our sales people use it when they make their rounds. Fire departments, mostly. Police Emergency Services. It's good for when you need to get through a wall in a hurry. Plus some government agencies. Delta Force uses it."

"Oh, okay," said McNamara. "Play-Doh."

"How's that?"

"That's what Delta calls it, Play-Doh."

"You get more bang for your buck than with C-4," said Charley. "A lot more. Your basic C-4 just doesn't compare with this stuff. We package it for Delta special, to look like one of those family-size toothpaste pump dispensers. We add peppermint and candy-cane colors so it'll get past the dogs."

The screen showed technicians putting a stick of it inside an old armored car. "Watch this," said Charley. "That's a twelve-hundred-grain stick, less than a quarter pound. Watch."

"Jesus."

"I'm standing one hundred yards away when they did that. I took Natasha along. She was just a little girl at the time. Anyway, one of my earplugs was in wrong. Didn't hear right for a week after that. Hell of a sound."

Charley pressed "stop." He passed the V-shaped stick down the table. Bundy and McNamara were at ease with it; the others handled it as if it would go off if they breathed on it wrong.

"Not gonna bite you. You can put it in the oven, hit it, light a match to it, stick it up your ass and fart, it will not go off without the nitro chip. Okay now, you all met Hot Stick here. They don't call him that for nothing. He's won the Scale Masters Championship three times. That's the World Series of UAV flying, so listen up. Hot Stick, talk to us."

"Yes, sir. First I want to say that me and my crew are proud to be part of the team."

Bundy and McNamara looked at each other dubiously.

"If I could, I'd like to take the opportunity to give the boys a little background on UAVs."

"All right, but we got a full agenda."

"Roger dodger. These aircraft go by different names. UAV, for unmanned aerial vehicle, RPV, for remotely piloted vehicle, or just RC, for remote-controlled. People who don't know better call them 'model airplanes.'"

"Now, the UAV, as we know it, originated during World War II when the Army needed to train antiaircraft gunners. Up to then they'd been towing targets, banners or drogues, behind airplanes and letting the ack-acks bang away at them. The trouble was, they tended to lose pilots, so they started to think in terms of self-propelled vehicles. I know Mr. Becker here is familiar with Project Aphrodite. That was sort of our answer to Hitler's doodlebugs, the V-1 and V-2 rockets. The Navy would take B-17s and B-24s that were coming up on the end of their service lives, rig them so they were remote-capable, pack them full of high explosives. The pilot and copilot would get them off the ground and up over the English Channel and then bail out. They put a sort of TV camera on it so a third pilot, flying alongside, could guide the bomber to its target. That's how young Joe Kennedy was killed. The bomber he was flying blew up on him over the Channel."

"I think we're all set on the history, thank you, Hot Stick."

"Roger. Real briefly then, the technology has come quite a ways since then. In the fifties RPVs were basically just your stick-and-stringer balsa-wood units that took hours and hours to build. Now we make the bodies out of preformed fiberglass or foam core. Then in 1972 J. J. Scozzufavva and Bob Violett developed the first ducted-fan jet engine and turned the UAV world upside-down. Now we had twenty-three thousand RPMs, speeds of up to a hundred fifty miles an hour. From the ground, you cannot tell the difference between these aircraft and the real thing."

"Horseshit," said McNamara.

"Except perhaps in the field of sound. A ducted-fan two-stroker will give you scale speed, but it won't give you scale sound. That's where those CD players you boys will be planting around the target perimeter will come in."

Bundy said to McNamara, "Boys?"

"As the UAVs approach, they'll transmit a signal to the boom boxes and activate the CD sound track. Mr. Dolby here has figured out a way to give us perfect stereo. Right, Dolby?"

"Uh huh."

"As they approach the perimeter, the signal will trigger the boom boxes on the near side, then as they fly by, the signal will activate the boom boxes on the other side of the perimeter."

Dolby said, "The problem I'm having, I mean, are we limited to these small jobs here? I mean, they'll do it, but they're only hundred-watt. I was telling Hot Stick earlier, I could rig us up some four-hundred-watt, eighteen-inch subwoofers with tuned ports and really push some air, you know what I'm saying? Make these dudes think we're the Monsters of Rock. But we'd need more juice. We could get it out of that portable generator you got down in engine room."

McNamara said, "I'm not humping a sixty-millimeter mortar, eighteen-inch speakers and a damn generator into the jungle."

Dolby shrugged. "Too bad, man. Be a totally awesome sound."

"I think the hundred-watt speakers will do fine," said Charley. "Hot Stick?"

"The important thing will be for Mac to time his mortar bombardments to my flybys. Think you can handle that?"

Mac looked at Bundy. Bundy shrugged, as if it would be too much effort. Hot Stick proceeded, unfazed.

"I'm pleased to say our attack profile will include one of the first true turbine UAVs, built by Mr. Brian Seegers himself. Brian doesn't know about this particular application of his technology, but I'm certain that if he did, he would be proud to be taking part in the war on drugs."

Charley stirred. "This isn't the war on drugs, son. This is my war."

"Yes, sir. As you know, true turbines won't give you scale speed, only about a hundred miles an hour. But they will give you scale sound ."

"I'm counting on it."

"I can deliver a hundred and ten decibels at a hundred feet. But the main advantage of the true turbine, for our purposes, isn't sound, but heat. Ordinarily these engines run so cool you can put your hand to the exhaust. Since we're not worried about reusability, I'm using a low-temperature grease in the shielded bearings and choking up on the ram air inlet, plus running a mix of thirty-five percent nitromethane into the fuel spray manifold. She's going to run hot."

"Hot enough to draw a heat-seeking missile?"

"I guarantee it. I'm pretty sure, anyway."

"Good, 'cause you're gonna be up there in the chopper with me. You don't think adding thirty-five percent nitro is a little on the combustible side?"

"No problem."

"Okay, talk to us about the attack profile. We're going in in three waves?"