Sheep Dog and the Wolf

by Douglass, Carl;

  “So, tonight, we’ll work on make-up and disguises. You might be amused to know that I have a Hollyweird com-symp pinko who became converted to the true gospel after spending some quality time with me. I saved her backside when some government types, who could not get over their enthusiasm for McCarthy’s doctrine, came after her. She’s good people—a bit weird, call it eccentric—but she keeps the faith. I meet her at the main gate at eight when it’s pretty dark. She’ll stay with us for a week, and she’s got a boxful of make-up and disguise goodies for you.”

  “I appreciate all of that, John.”

  “You can show it by being indefatigable and by putting up with my pushing you. I’m on your side, but for the next couple of months; I’ll seem like your worst nightmare.”

  “And that will be different how?” Hunter smiled.

  “You can’t even imagine. We’ll start in half an hour with a whirlwind course in explosives. The Company is bringing in a Company expert—an NYPD bomb squad vet of thirty years experience—and the piece de resistance—a reformed Palestinian bomber. Should make for interesting conversations at supper.”

  Hunter nodded.

  “Oh, carry a notepad and pen all the time. You are likely to live or die by the quality of your notes and your capacity to memorize. When you’re done, you will be given some sophisticated and untraceable fuses, det-cord, and concentrated HE materials.”

  Twelve hours a day for the next two weeks, Hunter exercised his brain like he had never done before. His only respite came with the early morning run and hard martial arts practice and with an hour each day in rifle, hand gun, and cross-bow shooting drills and repetitious knife throwing. His skills were at a peak, and he needed only to keep them there without burning out.

  The explosives training was exhaustive and exhausting: how to handle explosives ingredients—PETN [Pentaerythritol tetranitrate], RDX, or cyclonite [Cyclotrimethylenetri-nitramine], Semtex, sodium cyanide, nitric acid, diisopropyl fluoro-phosphates [for nerve gas]; dynamite, TNT, and ammonium nitrate—a common fertilizer component which is cheap and abundant and therefore a favorite of terrorists for their bombs.

  The Palestinian gave him The Terrorists’ Handbook—169 page document with detailed instructions for making chemical weapons and high explosives. The retired NYPD bomb squad detective gave him a dog-eared copy of Silent Death, Improvised Explosives, by “Uncle Foster”.

  Hunter memorized an encyclopedia of explosives information, the equivalent of a college semester in a month. He added to his mental repertoire such arcane bits as: PETN has a vDet—velocity of detonation—of 8,400 meters/sec, explosion energy of 5810 kJ/kg (1390 kcal/kg), an explosion temperature of 4230 °C. RDX has a vDet of 8,750 m/s and is safer, more stable, and more castable than PETN. Semtex is a general-purpose plastic explosive containing RDX and PETN which is used in commercial blasting, demolition, and in certain useful military applications. Semtex became notoriously popular with terrorists, the Palestinian told him, because it was, until recently, extremely difficult to detect, as in the case of Pan Am Flight 103.

  Hunter developed a practiced and practical working knowledge of how to program a throw-away cell phone detonator, how to lay an undetectable line of bouncing bettys along an approach of a target, how to make improvised explosive devises out of fertilizer, baking soda, and agricultural acid; and incendiary devises fashioned from water bottles, chemical toilet cleaner, and aluminum foil. He was instructed in how to make a shaped charge out of pentolite, how to initiate a PETN explosion with a laser beam, how to employ detonating cord such as brightly colored or transparent Primacord, and what type of fuses, and fuzes.

  A fuse is a simple pyrotechnic initiating device, like the cord on a common fire cracker. A fuze is the sophisticated ignition device employing both mechanical and electronic components; examples shown Hunter included proximity fuzes for an M107 shell, magnetic-acoustic fuzes used on sea mines, spring-loaded grenade fuzes, pencil detonators, antihandling devices, visco fuzes—which are simple fuses consisting of a burning core coated with wax or lacquer for durability and water resistance. The commercial and military version of a burning fuse is commonly referred to as safety fuse—a textile tube filled with combustible material and wrapped to prevent external exposure of the burning core. They are colored black in military ordnance and fluorescent orange in commercial usage. Safety fuses are used to initiate the detonation of explosives through the use of a blasting cap and to provide a time delay, a fact of which Hunter took particular note.

  Hunter was shown—with mind-numbing repetition—how to use the fuses and fuzes, and particularly, blasting caps, safely. With equally tedious repetition, Hunger learned which explosive materials to use in any particular situation and how to avoid being blown up. He developed a very healthy respect for unstable components like trinitrotoluene—TNT. The demolition squad team taught Hunter about avoiding detection. Fire debris submitted to forensic laboratories which employ sensitive analytical instruments with GC-MS capabilities for forensic chemical analysis can readily detect hydrocarbon-based fuels [petroleum distillates—gasoline, kerosene, turpentine, and butane—and various other flammable solvents like acetones, carbon disulfide, and even ethyl alcohol—the common ingredient in drinkable spirits], and solids such as white phosphorus. Ignitable liquids leave evidence in the fire debris, including irregular burn patterns. HPD-type accelerants—Heavy Petroleum Distil-lates—such as diesel fuel and number 2 fuel oil—the common home heating oil—are very difficult to detect as are certain types of rocket fuel.

  Being pragmatic, the team taught Hunter how to use common household items and objects which can accelerate a fire and are difficult to detect unless the arsonist uses excessively large amounts. They demonstrated how to get an arson fire going without using the more commonly detectable and almost prima facie evidence kind of hydrocarbon and other highly volatile liquids. They set fires near household heating units and electrical units with paraffin, insecticides, carpet and carpet padding, tar paper, shingles, wood, insulation, paper, sheet rock, vinyl flooring, and plastics. They showed their student how wicker and foam have high surface to mass ratios and favorable chemical compositions and thus burn easily and readily. Hunter learned to spread the non-petroleum distillate accelerants about the area of intended arson to minimize the evidence of the fire having been intentional. The methods the bomb squad experts showed their student demonstrated how to use large fuel loads to increase the rate of fire growth as well as spread the fire over a larger area, thus increasing the amount of fire damage.

  Each day he rested during supper—which he devoured voraciously—and had a short power nap. Then, beginning a week after the explosives lectures started, the strange elderly Hollywood make-up artist John had told him about arrived to teach him her magic for a week.

  “John, this is Hedy Lamarick, the famous Hollywood make-up artist,” John Smith I said, and Hunter could not help but detect the obvious fondness John had for the eccentric little woman.

  Hunter wondered what her real name was but knew that he did not need to know any more about her than she should be privy to about him outside their teacher-pupil relationship. He was looking at a wizened tiny woman of no less in age than her seventies. She could not have been more than four feet tall even in her entirely utilitarian black lace up orthopedic shoes. She had obvious scoliosis, with enough of a serpentine set of curvatures that no one would require medical training to recognize her deformity and to sympathize with the pain she must have had to live with her entire life. Her face was wrinkled and intense but artfully made-up to give the impression of a much younger woman if seen at a distance. She had crooked, unfetching teeth, a drooping mouth line, and horsey features; but her sad eyes were an intense grey, the intensity reminiscent of his own. Her hands were gnarled with Heberden’s arthritic nodes and crooked joints, but the nails were assiduously manicured and painted a tasteful shade of glossy maroon. Hedy wore an attractive matching maroon velvet dress and a wide, 1940s belt. Sh
e smiled at him, a smile that he felt to be more practiced than genuine.

  Hedy—her real name—looked briefly at the powerful, sinewy man with the scarred face standing over her. John Smith, indeed, she snorted to herself. But then, every person she dealt with in her work for The Company was John or Jane Smith, Pepe or Maria Gomez, or Chang Lee or Mary. In her work for John Smith I over the years, she had encountered some intimidating characters, but John had assured her that this one was the most frightening of them all. He had admonished her not to seek to know anything about him, and to forget having every seen or even heard of him. The man had icy hazel eyes that seemed to penetrate her brain stem and a nasty facial scar that had to have come from a machete or a bayonet. She gave a little shiver.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Ms Lamarick,” Hunter said both politely and kindly.

  “Please call me Hedy.”

  “Then, I’m John, Hedy.”

  “Would you like to get started?”

  “I’m ready and interested,” Hunter replied, which was the truth.

  The odd little woman was interesting to say the least; and he was convinced that what she had to teach him was crucial to the success of his missions to come and—probably—to his very survival, as much as the martial arts or weapons training.

  “Today, we will deal with the more mundane principles and practical steps in the use of make-up and easily applied disguises, some of which you can improvise from materials you encounter in daily life.

  “First, let us consider minimalist disguises. You can become one of the invisible people—the people who are there but are not seen. Consider a busy urban setting and going through the mundanities of every day life. You—like most people—are busy and focused on your own activities, goals, and contacts, both those with whom you are presently engaged and those with whom you expect to interact during the course of the day. The people around you—like the streets and buildings themselves—are ignored and do not become part of your memory bank. There are a great many chairs, sidewalks, buildings, and automobiles that must be occupied, it would seem; but the occupants are invisible. We simply do not register the servants, waiters and waitresses, housewives, gas station attendants, construction workers, post office workers, UPS drivers, and police in their respective uniforms, businessmen in their dull colored suits, or black and Asian people who all look alike. Jewish orthodox people, observant Muslim women in burqas, Indians in turbans, hippies with their tie-dye shirts, tattoos and piercings, the smelly and dirty homeless people…are all invisible; they are—as we say in the makeup and disguise world—in a state of ‘not-being’.

  “By and large, they have some invisibility characteristics in common including: they are what people expect to see—stereotypes; they all appear in context and therefore do not draw attention to themselves; they keep their heads down and avert their eyes; for the most part they are neither sexy nor colorful. Most of your contemporaries do not generally strike one as especially rich or poor; they do not flaunt jewelry or extravagant watches. They avoid seeing you or you seeing them. Most of them do not speak out in public—fool’s names and fools faces are often found in public places, an adage they recognize and make every effort to eschew—and they are loathe to be thought of as fools or to be thought of at all. They are invisible, as innocuous as wallpaper.

  “Your teacher has been good enough to bring in a few trunks of my rather extensive costume collection; so, you, too, can learn the subtle art of being invisible.”

  For the rest of the evening, Hunter and John I submitted to Hedy’s ministrations and rapidly changed from short-haired tough guys into bums, nuns, observing Muslims, police officers, janitors, mailmen, and a variety of ethnic people. She showed them how to apply just the right amount of coloration of make-up and dirt, how to wear various uniforms and regional clothing, and how to blend into the ebb and flow of everyday life by becoming another person, but an invisible one.

  The next evening after a long day’s session with the bomb makers and a quiet supper, Hedy returned, this time with a scruffy young man as an assistant.

  “Gentlemen, this is my young friend, Emmanuel. He is a reformed car thief. ..I think.”

  She gave the young man a slight affectionate smile.

  “Why a car thief, you might legitimately ask? Because the characters we created last evening are seen in public with their props, and those props are often automobiles. The cop has his squad car; the UPS man has his van; the construction worker has his pick-up with a logo on the door and equipment in the bed; and so on. Neither you nor your employers can readily come up with the appropriate vehicle from a prop department—that is the function of a movie studio crew working in a large warehouse. No—gentlemen—you will have to learn to steal and to do so quickly and without being detected. As a result of his unfortunate childhood, Emmanuel learned how to steal cars; and now is in the employ of your Company. He is very well traveled and has experience with just about every kind of vehicle in the world. Emmanuel, show the nice gentlemen how it is done.”

  A car-carrier pulled up in front of the house, and Emmanuel quickly and expertly drove the vehicles off the truck’s ramps and onto the lawn, locked the doors and placed their keys in a cardboard box on the porch. He then proceeded with a tutorial on the fine arts of bypassing car door locks using simple tools that included wire clothes hangers, thin metal bars, and on one new Cadillac, resorted to a drill to remove the lock with brute force. Then, he patiently showed the two men how to bypass the ignitions of all of the vehicles and explained which cars could not be jumpstarted because of their computerized locking and ignition systems.

  “Just stay away from them,” he said.

  When—after an hour—he stopped demonstrating and talking, he took a break to roll himself a cigarette, adding finely crushed dry leaves from a sandwich sized baggie. The resultant smoke was pungent, aromatic, sweet, and familiar to John I and Hunter; but they avoided making remarks.

  “Now, it’s your turn,” Emmanuel said, looking at Hunter.

  The next hour, Hunter spent breaking into cars and trucks. He was frustratingly slow, and Emmanuel was a harsh critic. The third time around, Emmanuel used a stop-watch to time Hunter’s progress; and the adage of ‘practice-makes-perfect’ proved apt. Hunter was able to put himself in the driver’s seat of a locked car in less than thirty seconds, and to have the car running in less than a minute 90% of times. Hunter was not overly surprised to see that John I was completely familiar with this nefarious art, and was able to move his vehicles with less wasted motion and faster. However, Emmanuel finally pronounced that Hunter had passed the course with an A- and was declared fit for service.

  During the last hour of the evening, Hedy made Hunter dress the role of police officer and UPS driver, make his way with convincing nonchalance into the appropriate vehicle, and to drive it away across the lawn three separate times.

  The next three evenings, Hunter practiced the nuances of makeup application, choice and use of wigs, use of props like canes, crutches, boxes, and bags for his role as a derelict, and how to dress, move, and how to speak like a pregnant woman, a mature woman, an Eton educated British businessman, a cockney, an Indian subcontinent salesman, and an oil executive from Iceland—which proved to be the most difficult accent of all to master. Hedy taught him a few catch phrases in a dozen foreign languages that he could use to avoid the incriminating embarrassment of not being able to match his speech to his character role at all.

  “In your nice little make-up bag, John, I am including suntan inducing cream, color sticks for African Brown and Ivory White, which is useful to help you look sick or old or just pathetic.”

  She had him apply color with a makeup sponge and taught him how to use translucent powder and setting spray, how to darken portions of his nose and to lighten others to create the illusion of larger or smaller facial features, how to put on a bra and to fill it so it looked natural, what kind of glasses, hats, and veils to choose, how to make wrinkles and ble
mishes, or to take them away. They spent sessions on the application of temporary tattoos.

  Hunter was clumsy with the transition to being a woman. Hedy gave him a myriad of tips.

  “Women are more careless and sexy today. They show more skin. So, even though you will best play the role of a mature woman, wear a dress or blouse that shows some chest skin.”

  Hunter started to protest.

  Reading his mind, Hedy said, “So be sure to shave thoroughly and to apply body makeup. Cake it on. Wear a black bra which calls attention to the very fact that you are wearing one and are—therefore—what you are generally trying to appear to be—a woman. Let a bra strap show. Men and women expect it. Women now show thong straps on purpose, but maybe you won’t want to go that far.”

  Hunter laughed and nodded his agreement.

  “And for heaven’s sake, don’t try to wear real high heels. You walk like a cowboy who fell astride a fence pole when he was a boy. In heels, you’ll wobble around like that same sailor who’s had too much to drink. Stay with sensible shoes. Wear reasonable earrings. Every woman wears earrings; and they are expected; but don’t get gaudy.”

  She produced a small jewelry box and gave it to Hunter. He gave the contents a cursory glance, enough to see that she had provided a sensible collection of conservative jewelry.

  “Your hands are hopeless. Wear jewelry whenever you are a woman. Keep your hands demurely folded or in your purse, or busy fumbling with papers; so, no one has time to scrutinize those big paws.”

  Hedy made a MoldGel alginate dental impression and from that created several sets of false overlay teeth which she gave him. He was impressed with the alteration that occurred in his appearance with just the change of teeth. The teeth in the dental prostheses were of different sizes, variations of white, yellow, and brownish hues, degrees of orthodontic symmetry, and apparent levels of periodontal disease.