“What do you think? Have you calculated the cost?”
“Of replacing all of the batteries on the boards we have produced? At least seven million,” Dane said.
“What about injuries and lawsuits? It seems to me one percent isn’t worth the trouble and expense. Insurance will cover the cost of lawsuits,” Cal said.
“Yes,” Dane agreed, nodding his head. “But that's not the worst of it. Doing it would throw everything off schedule. The product release, the PR campaign, the IPO, all of it.”
“The cost, individually, will be many multiples of seven million. If word gets out before the PR campaign that there’s a problem…”
“Everything will swirl down the toilet,” Dane said.
“How many copies of this memo are there?” Cal asked.
“Just the one,” Dane replied.
“Are you sure?”
“Not positively, no. But I know Irving. If he says he only made one, then I believe him. This guy is such a tech-geek-nonhuman I don’t think he’s capable of deception,” Dane said.
“He’s off work for a few days?”
“Until Monday,” Dane replied.
“Okay,” Cal said after taking twenty or so seconds to think it over. He set his drink on the table and looked squarely at Dane. “Do nothing until Monday. Give me a few days to think about this. But get in the office early and grab this guy's computer first thing tomorrow morning.”
Cal went to the trouble of walking Dane through the house to his car. While doing this, he was quite affable and treated Dane as if he were a younger brother. While Dane was driving off, Cal stood silently watching him go. Having been made aware that there might be battery problems before and the engineer would make a stink about them, Cal Simpson had already made plans on how to solve it. Five minutes after Dane had left, Cal made a discreet phone call on a burner phone he had. A cryptic twenty-second conversation with the man who answered the call set the solution in motion.
Irving Haraldson, Cannon Toys' chief engineer, and project whistle-blower, had an itch that needed to be scratched. He had been married to the same woman, Catherine, for forty years. Four now grown children had come along and the two of them had built a good life together. Irving was an excellent engineer and made a good living. Catherine had raised the three girls and one son to be solid, productive adults.
But Irving had this itch he could not deny. Catherine knew what it was but refused to admit it. By maintaining that attitude, she could pretend, or at least tell herself, it did not exist. Irving’s itch was a sexual need for other men. Irving had successfully suppressed it for the first fifty-plus years of his life. Then, on a business trip to a seminar in Chicago, he had a couple of drinks too many and gave in to his yearnings. Since then, for the past ten years or so, he had stopped bothering to pretend they were not real.
The Saturday evening following his meeting with his bosses, Irving was in downtown Minneapolis. Catherine, as usual, had gone to bed early allowing Irving to head out to his favorite hookup bar for middle age men. Even socially awkward men like Irving had little trouble finding a friend for the evening at Pauline’s on Fourth.
Irving squeezed onto a bar stool between two men at the bar and waited for the bartender to finish with a customer. The place was crowded for a Saturday night and it took all of ten minutes for Irving to get a ten-dollar glass of bad, trendy, specialty beer that, like almost all of them, tasted like it was strained through someone’s gym socks. A minute later the two men to his right moved off. The empty bar stool was quickly filled with a man who looked to be close to Irving’s age. Within a few minutes Irving and his new friend, Bud, had made the connection.
“Um, I’m, ah, kind of new to this,” Bud claimed. “You, ah, want to get out of here?”
“Sure,” Irving replied, the tightness in his lower abdomen increasing. “I know a secluded place we can go. It’s down by the river,” Irving added thinking of a spot he had been to before.
When they got outside, Irving asked Bud if he was going to tell him his real name. Bud giggled and said maybe later. Five minutes later they were parked among the trees along a street leading down to the Mississippi. Before Irving could get out of his car, Bud, who had parked behind him, was approaching the driver’s door where Irving waited.
Irving anxiously pushed the button to open his window. He looked up expecting to see Bud smiling but instead was staring directly into the barrel of a silenced handgun. Three seconds later Bud was calmly walking back to his car. He had popped off three quick shots from a .22 caliber revolver into Irving’s head. The hollow point bullets had shredded Irving's brain matter and killed him almost instantly.
The sound suppressor attached to the small caliber pistol had done its job well. Anyone on the street, a hundred yards through the trees, would be hard-pressed to hear the shots. Because it was a revolver, there was no expenditure of gasses which also kept the noise down and no shell casings to recover.
Within fifteen minutes, the disguise and gloves Bud wore along with the gun were in a small burlap bag. He had tossed the bag and its contents into the river and made the call to Cal Simpson.
THREE
TODAY
Air Force Major General Alex Connors was in a surly mood. Followed by two other senior Air Force officers, General Connors was leaving a briefing room at Nellis Air Force base in Nevada. The three men had just finished conferring with Lt. Colonel Mike Nicoletti, a veteran Air Force test pilot.
The car to take the three officers to observe another test flight was waiting for them. Holding the door was Tech Sergeant Gabriela Torres. She sharply saluted as the three men entered the back seat barely receiving an acknowledgment from any of them. As Sgt. Torres pulled away from the building for the five-mile drive she pressed the button to put the privacy window up so her passengers could talk. Along with General Connors was one-star Brigadier General Stanley Coles and Colonel Gary Kopp.
“The aircraft is coming along. It should be in production in about six months,” General Cole said.
“Yeah, another technological wonder that we didn’t ask for, don’t need and don’t want,” General Connors grumbled. “What do you think, Gary?” he asked the colonel sitting to his left in the middle of the three men.
“I think I’m a good soldier, sir. I’ve been given my orders, and I’ll do what I’m told,” the man said suppressing a grin.
These officers were well known to each other. They were senior members of the Air Force procurement department within the Pentagon assigned to oversee the development of a new aircraft. The aircraft was designated the A-15 Tiger Hawk, and it was being produced to replace the A-10 Thunderbolt, affectionately nicknamed the Warthog.
The Warthog is a close air support aircraft whose primary mission is attacking ground targets, especially enemy tanks. It had been in service since the mid-1970’s and had been an enormously effective aircraft. It is a tank killer that can fly at altitudes as low as one hundred feet with armaments, bombs, missiles and machine gun fire that can devastate enemy soldiers in close proximity to U.S. forces.
Members of Congress, in their never-ending quest for re-election, decided the A-10 should be replaced. The A-15, a faster, lighter and far more expensive aircraft was forced on the Air Force. Despite the insistence of the Pentagon that the A-10 was capable of meeting the military's mission requirements for at least another twenty years, Congress decided they knew best, and the A-15 project was born.
“Jobs, Alex,” General Coles reminded him. “This isn’t about the military’s mission. It’s a jobs program for eight states, a dozen congressional districts and multiple billions of dollars of re-election pork.”
“I know,” Connors replied. “It’s just aggravating. We’re short on spare parts for the aircraft we have, and they’re throwing ten to fifteen billion dollars at this.”
“But it’s always the military who is wasting the taxpayer’s money,” Coles sarcastically said referring to the media and their constant storie
s about Pentagon waste.
“And the Army is short on bullets,” Colonel Kopp interjected. “Although, it is an exceptional aircraft,” he added.
“We’ll see,” Connors grumbled. “Morton Aviation is not my first choice to build anything.”
Sgt. Torres stopped near the door to the eight-story observation tower. She held her salute as the three men exited the car. The July Nevada heat was over one hundred degrees and the officers hurried to get into the air-conditioned building.
Lt. Colonel Mike Nicoletti was a graduate of the Air Force Academy and a twenty-year veteran pilot. He had flown the A-10 in combat in both Afghanistan and Iraq and was one of its most ardent supporters. Married with three children, the oldest heading for high school in the fall, Mike had been a test pilot for two years working primarily on the A-15 program. It was an excellent aircraft, but in his opinion, was only a minimal improvement over his beloved Warthog. Faster because of the thinner skin from new, stronger, bullet resistant covering helped keep the weight down. Other than that, Mike could find no significant advantage to be gained for the Air Force’s mission.
Today would be his fourth test flight. The first three went smoothly enough. The one today would be the first time he would go down to one hundred feet to simulate an attack run. He carried no armament on this flight. The purpose was to check out the aircraft at the slower speed and lower altitude. Something in the back of Mike’s mind nagged at him a bit. A feeling he could not shake that all was not quite right.
The A-15, like its predecessor the A-10, was a fixed-wing, twin-engine aircraft with only the pilot in the cockpit. Before today’s flight Mike had meticulously gone over the pre-flight checklist and found everything in order. Today’s flight was scheduled to last two hours, and he was to put the bird through its most rigorous, most thorough test flight so far.
Following a smooth takeoff, he quickly rose to a cruising altitude of fifteen thousand feet. Mike leveled off, all the while talking to the ground control and engineers at Nellis, then punched the G.E. engines to their maximum. The bird responded beautifully. It jumped forward, smoother, quicker and with more ease than the A-10 ever did. But, Mike thought, not necessarily an advantage for a close air support aircraft.
For the next hour, he put it through its high-altitude paces and was very impressed. Especially with the speed and turning maneuverability.
Lt. Colonel Nicoletti was also a veteran of the Air Force fighter planes and, while the A-15 was not in that class, it was a very smooth, responsive aircraft. However, the Tiger Hawk was not a fighter plane. The real test would come during the second hour of the flight. That was when he would put it through its paces in a simulated ground attack.
Directly in front of the observation tower where the brass and Morton Aviation engineers were watching was a mock target range. No firing would be done today, but Mike was scheduled to make low-altitude runs at various speeds over the targets. Having logged over one hundred actual combat sorties in the A-10, flying over dummy targets should be about as worrisome as driving a car to the grocery store.
As he wheeled the bird around to make his first run from West to East, the nagging little tick in the back of his head came back. Being a professional with thousands of hours of flight time logged, Mike Nicoletti knew better than to ignore it. The aircraft was running smooth-as-silk giving him no indication that anything was wrong. But the little tick was still there. He lined up for the runway from three miles out, dropped the nose and went into a simulated attack.
The first run over the target was at a standard 300 mph at an altitude of 100 feet. Nicoletti went through the motions of firing the 30mm nose gun, blew past the observation tower and target area and quickly rose to cruising altitude. The bird had handled the run flawlessly. If anything, it was the smoothest attack run Mike had ever been through.
The next two runs, one at 400 mph at 200 feet and the last at 350 mph at barely fifty feet off the deck went almost as well. The only glitch, if you could even call it that, was a tiny, almost imperceptible shudder at the lowest altitude. By the time he was back at cruising altitude, Mike Nicoletti was falling in love. Although even he admitted the Air Force did not need to replace the A-10, if Congress was going to force them to do it, this was going to be an outstanding aircraft to replace it with.
While Mike Nicoletti flew back to land the A-15, after relaying to the tower how smoothly the test went, there was a minor celebration among the observers. Mostly among the aircraft's engineers and executives and handshakes from the Air Force brass. Despite the earlier, negative grumblings from the three officers, there was a real sense of relief among them. Their careers were on the line, especially General Connors, the military's head of the project. If he wanted that third star, as he certainly did, this was the aircraft that would get it for him.
Everyone in the tower hurried down to get to the briefing. By the time Nicoletti had put the A-15 to bed, a small crowd was waiting for him. They were in the same briefing room he had met General Connors in before the flight. Included with the Morton Aviation executives was a very fetching woman in her late-thirties. Her name was Anna Evans and she was from the PR firm hired by Morton Aviation to promote their latest product.
A little over an hour after it started, the pilot debriefing and its Q & A were winding down. Anna went up to Nicoletti and had him read a press release she was preparing.
Nicoletti, sitting on a folding table facing the crowd took a couple of minutes to read it over. When he finished it, he handed it back to Anna.
“Is that a fair statement, Colonel?” Anna asked.
“Yes, a little more hyperbole than I would use, but accurate,” he answered wearing a hotshot pilot’s smile for a pretty woman.
“You don’t mind if I quote you? I won’t use your name,” she asked ignoring the ‘come on’ look she was getting.
“No, not at all,” he replied.
“Good, thanks,” Anna said then turned to show what she had prepared to the Morton execs.
The next edition of Aviation Week featured a cover photo of the A-15. Inside was a glowing article about the aircraft and the coup that Morton Aviation had pulled off in its development. The Air Force, or so the magazine article claimed, was going to order seven hundred and fifty of them to be delivered over the next five years. At the cost of twenty-six million each, Morton Aviation, after an absence of more than a decade, was back in the military hardware business.
Over the next two weeks, Morton Aviation stock took off. It rose over thirty –eight percent before dropping a bit and leveling off at seventy-eight dollars per share.
FOUR
Lynn McDaniel was not sure whether to be angry, scared or both. Lynn had spent the entire day—it was now after 9:00 P.M.—in one of the firm’s conference rooms. She was a senior associate with Everson, Reed, a one-hundred lawyer firm headquartered in downtown Minneapolis. She had spent the day poring over discovery documents. Even with two full-time junior associates to assist her, it was a slow and tedious process. In this room alone there were over fifty boxes to go through and at least that many more to come.
Lynn had sent her two assistants home ten minutes ago. They had billed twelve hours each today anyway. She was seated in the middle of the long rectangle conference room table. In front of her was a document she had found and was now staring at, regretting that her fingerprints were on it. The boxes of documents they were going over were corporate records from Cannon Brothers Toys. Cannon Brothers was the client and Everson, Reed was defending the company in a class-action lawsuit. The document Lynn was staring at was pure poison to their client’s case.
She had a document box on the table next to her, the one in which she had found the memo she did not want to read. Lynn stood up, placed the box on top of the memo and then exited the conference room. She used her key to lock the door and then went to her office. Lynn had a phone call to make and wanted to use her personal phone so the firm would not have a record of it. The firm made a record of e
verything, including phone calls, to make sure you billed everything you did to a case file. While at her desk, she retrieved a pack of cigarettes and a lighter and took them with her to the elevator.
Once outside on the sidewalk, she lit up a smoke and began pacing up and down. The occasional cigarette was a guilty pleasure she enjoyed when happy, drinking or stressed. Lynn lied to herself that it was no big deal; she could quit anytime, and she wasn’t really addicted to them.
She finished the first one and tossed it into the street. Calmer now, she looked around and realized she had not been outside since arriving at the office this morning at 6:45. It was a beautiful, late-June, early-summer evening. And once again, Lynn found herself wondering why she was doing this. Why was she working ninety hours a week? Especially on a case she hated. In fact, Lynn wished she was working for the plaintiffs. They had a better case and were actually helping people, not covering up corporate malfeasance.
Lynn lit another cigarette then scrolled through her phone to find the number she wanted. She pressed the dial and listened while the call went through. While waiting for her boss to answer it, Lynn again tried to recall exactly when it was that she sold her soul.
It took six rings before her call was answered. When it was, it was the one person on the planet Lynn did not want to hear on the other end.
“Hello, Samantha,” Lynn said as cheerfully as possible. “Is Zach available?” she asked immediately regretting her choice of words.
“Just a moment,” Lynn heard the woman say barely concealing her annoyance.
Once again, the thought, she knows went through Lynn’s head. And once again she found herself also thinking, too bad, I don’t care.
A moment later she heard the familiar voice of her boss, Zach Evans.
“What’s up?” he asked.
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