Balance must be close to perfect with either the entire nacelle or three-quarters of it. That meant having optional mounting points on the frame. These changes had taken time, but not so much time as Lander had feared. He had a little over a month before the Super Bowl. Of that month he would lose most of the last two weeks flying football games. That left him about seventeen working days. There was time for one more refinement.
He set up on his workbench a thick sheet of fiberglass five inches by seven and one-half inches in size. The sheet was reinforced with metal mesh and curved in two planes, like a section of watermelon rind. He warmed a piece of plastic explosive and rolled it into a slab of the same size, carefully increasing the thickness of the plastic from the center toward the ends.
Lander attached the slab of plastic to the convex side of the fiberglass sheet. The device now looked like a warped book with a cover on only one side. Smoothed over the plastic explosive were three layers of rubber sheeting cut from a sick-room mattress cover. On top of these went a piece of light canvas bristling with .177 caliber rifle darts. The darts sat on their flat bottoms, glued to the canvas closer together than the nails in a fakir’s bed. As the dart-studded canvas was pulled tight around the convex surface of the device, the sharp tips of the darts diverged slightly. This divergence was the purpose of curving the device. It was necessary if the darts were to spread out in flight in a predetermined pattern. Lander had marked out the ballistics with great care. The shape of the darts should stabilize them in flight just like the steel flechettes used in Vietnam.
Now he attached three more layers of dart-covered canvas. In all, the four layers contained 944 darts. At a range of sixty yards, Lander calculated, they would riddle an area of one thousand square feet, one dart striking in each 1.07 square feet with the velocity of a high-powered rifle bullet. Nothing could live in that strike zone. And this was only the small test model. The real one, the one that would hang beneath the blimp, was 317 times bigger in surface area and weight and carried an average of 3.5 darts for every one of the 80,985 persons Tulane Stadium could seat.
Fasil came into the workshop as Lander was attaching the outside cover, a sheet of fiberglass the same thickness as the skin of the nacelle.
Lander did not speak to him.
Fasil appeared to pay little attention to the object on the workbench, but he recognized what it was, and he was ap palled. The Arab looked around the workshop for several minutes, careful not to touch anything. A technician himself, trained in Germany and North Vietnam, Fasil could not help admiring the neatness and economy with which the big nacelle was constructed.
“This material is hard to weld,” he said, tapping the Reynolds alloy tubing. “I see no heliarc equipment. Did you farm out the work?”
“I borrowed some equipment from the company over the weekend.”
“The frame is stress-relieved as well. Now that, Mr. Lander, is a conceit.” Fasil intended this as a joking compliment to Lander’s craftsmanship. He had decided his duty lay in getting along with the American.
“If the frame warped and cracked the fiberglass shell, someone might see the darts as we rolled it out of the truck,” Lander said in a monotone.
“I thought you would be packing in the plastic by now, with only a month remaining.”
“Not ready yet. I have to test something first.”
“Perhaps I can be of assistance.”
“Do you know the explosive index of this material?”
Fasil shook his head ruefully. “It’s very new.”
“Have you ever seen any of it detonated?”
“No. I was instructed that it is more potent than C-4. You saw what it did to Muzi’s apartment.”
“I saw a hole in the wall and I can’t tell enough from that. The most common mistake in making an antipersonnel device is putting the shrapnel too close to the charge, so the shrapnel loses its integrity in the explosion. Think about that, Fasil. If you don’t know it you should know it. Read this field manual and you will find out all about it. I’ll translate the big words for you. I don’t want these darts fragmented in the blast. I am not interested in merely filling seventy-five institutes for the deaf. I don’t know how much buffer is necessary between the darts and the plastic to protect them.”
“But look at how much is in a claymore-type device—”
“That’s no indication. I’m dealing with longer ranges and infinitely more explosive. Nobody has ever built one this big before. A claymore is the size of a schoolbook. This is the size of a lifeboat.”
“How will the nacelle be positioned when it is detonated?”
“Over the fifty-yard line at precisely one hundred feet altitude, lined up lengthwise with the field. You can see how the curve of the nacelle conforms to the curve of the stadium.”
“So—”
“So, Fasil, I have to also be sure that the darts will disperse in the correct arc, rather than blowing out in big lumps. I’ve got some leeway inside the skin. I can exaggerate the curves if I have to. I’ll find out about the buffer and about the dispersal when we detonate this,” Lander said, patting the device on his workbench.
“It’s got at least a half kilo of plastic in it.”
“Yes.”
“You can’t set it off without drawing the authorities.”
“Yes, I can.”
“You would have no time to examine the results before the authorities came.”
“Yes, I will.”
“This is—” He nearly said “madness,” but stopped himself in time. “This is very rash.”
“Don’t worry about it, A-rab.”
“May I check your calculations?” Fasil hoped he could devise a way to stop the experiment.
“Help yourself. Remember, this is not a scale model of the side of the nacelle. It just contains the two compound curves used in dispersing the shrapnel.”
“I’ll remember, Mr. Lander.”
Fasil spoke privately with Dahlia as she was carrying out the trash. “Talk to him,” he said in Arabic. “We know the thing will work as it is. This business of the test is not an acceptable risk. He will lose everything.”
“It might not work perfectly,” she replied in English. “It must be without flaw.”
“It does not have to be that perfect.”
“For him, it does. For me, too.”
“For the purpose of the mission, for what we set out to do, it will work adequately the way it is.”
“Comrade Fasil, pushing the button in that gondola on January twelfth will be the last act of Michael Lander’s life. He won’t see what comes after. Neither will I, if he needs me to fly with him. We have to know what’s coming after, do you understand that?”
“I understand that you are beginning to sound more like him than like a front-fighter.”