Chapter 25.
Just a reminder, 100% of this story is 100% fiction.
Weapons development ideas were work-related so we stayed home and talked to a lead technology developer at the Nevada DOD facility about spiders and getting them aboard a fleeing vehicle. We actually spent five hours brainstorming and making notes and decided it was going to be our new project.
After a long discussion we agreed that getting spiders aboard any moving vehicle would probably cause damage, either from the impact or being launched. We considered many ways of propelling them but in each case the impact caused a serious risk for damage.
Here's the dilemma: picture yourself standing beside a busy city street. A vehicle involved in a felony crime was about to speed past. No matter how they were thrown or shot the impact killed the spiders, but one method we found would probably not destroy their fragile parts.
The best idea we came up with so far was a container about the size of a tin of chewing tobacco, like a tin of Skoal. A cop sets a couple on the street, too small for the perps to notice. The suspects drive over the can, and it senses the large metallic object and released a spring that launched it at the underside; the impact ejected the can lid.
The spiders inside sensed the impact and freed themselves. The spiders run to the engine compartment and kill the ignition. All vehicles have easily located ignition parts that will stall a vehicle quickly and easily if attacked. They also have holes in the passenger compartment for entering and accessing the computer under the driver's seat and crashed the microprocessor that would immediately stall the engine. David and I were both engineers, so we decided to work on it as: Project Spider Launcher (PSL). Spiders came from the factory knowing how to stall vehicle engines of any sort: electric, gasoline, diesel, or propane/natural gas powered. Our primary challenge was to get them onboard a moving vehicle, undamaged.
From testing done in Nevada they already knew that from the moment a spider made contact with a vehicle, moving or not, it only took a few seconds to move to the engine compartment and locate the ignition coil or computer port and stalled the engine. The longest we ever timed was eleven seconds from contact to 'lights-out' on a gasoline engine.
Our next task was to find something off the shelf (if possible) that was able to independently launch a can with 2-3 spiders inside. Maybe the spring could also serve as an inductor like a metal detector to sense when the vehicle was close enough to release a pin and launch the can.
Picture our project scenario: a car driving at 75mph passes over a small can. It had less than one second to sense the metal and release the spring that propelled the magnet against the underside of a vehicle, half the can remained on the ground. That's a pretty tall order for a low cost device to accomplish in under half a second. That was our design goal. David already called dibs on the patent. If we could get it to work cheaply the DOD said they would create a pepper spray gas pellet for the spiders too. Inside a closed car it might be as good as killing the ignition. Remember, the goal was to shut down the car, not to kill the driver. If the spider was able to access the computer it was also able to hide on the driver's clothes and stay hidden in their clothes for hours.
For the police car chase scenario you set a couple cans on the street and told the cops to drop back, let the perp take the lead. Like police stop-sticks the cops had to be aware of the cans so the spiders didn't take them out too. If they got access to any car's computer it was usually wrecked, which was often an expensive repair. In the ignition circuit by the engine the repair was usually just a blown fuse on the ignition coil, a 35-cent repair.
There weren't many vehicles with protected ignition coils, most were found in rough terrain applications used in Africa and Australia. Our spiders would not be able to use that route and would have to go after the computer which would take up to 30 seconds to enter the passenger compartment and disable the computer. There were lots of routes inside a passenger compartment from the engine compartment, just ask anyone that drove their car into a lake. The water gets inside from lots of places, and all of them allowed spiders to enter too. The trunk and back seat were often easy routes into a car.
This is how we envisioned using the PSL cans. You unwrapped the weapon, twisted the halves one full turn until the arrows lined up and the halves were locked and ready to deploy, then you pulled out a plastic strip to activate the device. Set it on the pavement then wait to watch as the perp raced by.
On impact it made a sound on the underside of the vehicle like it got hit by a stone. Seconds later the engine died and the ride was over. We noted that spiders designed for this application went into self destruct mode much sooner than normal. With two spiders in each can it made their cost around $250,000 each. Nevada said simplifying their software did not reduce the cost. The Nevada people reminded us the muscle fibers that made their legs move cost more per ounce than the price of gold x6. The muscle fibers and the microprocessor inside each spider accounted for most of their $110,000 (each) cost to make and ship. Spider bodies were smaller than a gummy bear. Their legs had three segments each, and were cast in Titanium, about the size of the 'I' on a computer keyboard. Skoal can size weapons would easily fit in the Pelican case or the Batsuit case.
Our next step was to find a company to make prototype cans, but they wouldn't need a security clearance, we'd add metal detecting circuitry later on. It was such a fun afternoon designing the jumping Skoal can launchers we stayed up to 0500 and took the next day off, called the OD to explain why we wouldn't be in today! Unfortunately, our brainstorming session kept one of the Nevada engineers up all night gabbing on the video chat with us, but it was great fun too. Shit like that was what all of us went to college for!
David seemed happy and amped-up the entire time, when we got in bed it was already light in the eastern sky, above the Hueco (WAY-ko) Mountains. I rested my head on his shoulder so I could rub my fingertips in circles over his tits, which got him in the mood so we went out to the pool to swim laps underwater. Weeks ago we stretched a plastic rope the length of the pool to try to keep us in our own lanes so we didn't crash. Hitting the rope with my hand always discombobulated my brain, like I was afraid of drowning if I touched the stupid lane rope. I think David liked to stretch and move around before sex so he was limbered up and ready for some hip muscle action. You should always stretch and limber-up before any physical competition.
After laps David got on top of me on one of our loungers, the blinds above the back yard were closed so the satellites couldn't watch. I thought I caught a glimpse of the neighbor kid's eyes peering over the block wall. When he had his bedroom window open he could hear most sounds from our back yard, sometimes it woke him up and he came outside to take a peek. He wasn't gay but he was curious about what we did. I think he liked to watch us fuck by the pool. We tried really hard to keep the noise down. The sound of David's belly slapping against my ass cheeks could be heard outside the rock wall. We learned that when the blinds were closed it sort of kept the sound in the yard and amplified it. There was a six foot gap between the top of the rock wall and the blinds. We usually left them open so dust didn't accumulate on top. The control for the blinds was inside on the wall by the kitchen door so it's easy to give the knob a spin on the way out the door so they were shut within 15 seconds. It took them thirty seconds to go from one way to fully in the opposite direction. The control inside looked like a dimmer knob for lights over the dining room table.
If you left them shut for a few days then spun the knob it sprinkled briefly in the back yard as the accumulated dust fell into the pool. If people were eating or drinking around the pool it was best not to open the sun blinds.
We made it back to bed around 0745 after drinking several beers each and slept until 4pm. While we were getting into bed he reminded me we were not obligated to use spiders, even a pepper spray bomb might work and cost a lot less. We could light a few of them and toss 'em in the road directly in their path; it only took a tiny amount in the eyes and lungs to put most people out of commission. Except maybe not someone who worked in a spice processing factory.
That evening David handed me a sheet of paper, he said he printed the front page of a web site that sold custom pillow cases and bed sheets. At first I was unsure why he thought I wanted it. He saw my confusion and raised his t-shirt to flash me one of his tits, then it clicked... Our last big drunk, I had the bed spins and puked but he wouldn't let me snuggle against him.
I spread out a plain white bed sheet and got David to lie flat on it. Then I took about a dozen nude photos of him on his back (with his arms straight out), from his shoulder blades to his balls, his dick laid out sideways like a long bratwurst. I orally got him half hard so it looked plump and juicy-wet then I took more photos until I had one that looked perfect. We ordered five pillow cases with that shot printed in color on both sides. They'll arrive in three weeks, $29 each. He said that was my birthday gift. The best part was he spent a while longer walking around the house with no clothes on and I got to enjoy the view. I wanked twice that hour but he ignored me so he didn't have to help clean jizz off the sofa cushions.
The pillow case maker said when you rested your face on one you couldn't feel the image, it was burned-in like a thermal process on treated cotton, then the treatment was washed off and left the slightly faded image behind. The three-color images were guaranteed to last five years.
The party.
That weekend we were invited to a neighbor's back yard BBQ party. Our HOA rules allowed parties and even a live band until 9pm weekdays, 11pm on weekends. But those required notice to the neighbors two weeks in advance. The tradition was to invite anyone that might complain. There were about sixty homes on our block. There were only three others with in-ground backyard pools. We got invited because he (Mike Brown) was a city cop and knew something about us and our employer; we'd met before a few times. This party was mostly for cops and fire department guys (government employees). I was assured there would be no fights or drunks puking in the yard. They said a couple neighbors would be there too.
We offered to bring food and were told it was a requirement but they hadn't asked because this was our first time, so we agreed to bring beer instead. The house was across the street and four doors to the west, closer to Dyer Street. We got the impression this group of friends were 100% hetero, but our status was no secret. We assumed that like most folks, when it came to being gay normal people didn't care.
One other thing I would say about us was we'd made a lot of bonus cash doing our jobs. It's very uncommon to find a young gay couple in their late 20s that were easily the wealthiest in the subdivision. But we were not at all conspicuous about it. The only two things we had that hinted at wealth were the back yard pool and my car (which was rarely driven and lived under a canvas cover in the garage). Attending a party with a bunch of cops might cause someone to ask us about income. To them excess wealth often meant organized crime involvement.
We walked out the front door five minutes after the invite time, and we brought two cases of beer, each six pack a different brand, and they were ice cold too.
As we walked out the door it was starting to get dark outside because the sun was behind the Franklin Mountains. David said, "Wow, what a party." Down the block we saw the residents had strung red Christmas lights in their trees forming an arrow pointing at the front door. Directly in front of the house was an antique fire department ladder truck. It had lights on and we heard the sound of a generator running. When we got closer we saw they had extended the ladder straight up in the sky. And both sides of the street were lined with parked cars.
We arrived and were greeted beside the fire truck, and David took a tour of the fire truck. It looked to be from the early 1960s and appeared to be in excellent shape. The truck was proudly marked 'Onset Mass, Ladder-1.' Onset was a town near the Cape Cod Canal. Inside, I unpacked the beer and buried the cans in large ice chests on the dining room floor. The resident (the city cop we knew for over a year now) was named Mike Brown; he was a sergeant with the city police. He was divorced and lived here with his adult daughter Melinda, she was 26 and recently graduated from UTEP and was looking for a job with her new bachelor's degree in English. Mike was rather homely but he had a large bulge in his pants. Was it a urine bag or huge testicles, I had no clue but it was properly noted in my brain. Mike was a big dude, about 6'2" and maybe 210 pounds of muscle, like a college football player type. Lots of firemen were big dudes.
Mike's best friend Alex was the proud owner of the antique fire truck he'd purchased with an insurance settlement from being hit by a drunk driver. He purchased the truck and hand-rebuilt the ladder and restored the entire vehicle; it looked almost new. It was his pride and joy and appeared in every holiday parade in El Paso. I had zero interest in fire trucks but David liked anything with a large engine.
He explained it was modified to run the hydraulics from an external power source so the main engine didn't need to run, as it drank diesel like crazy. He said it would never pass state inspection but it was fine as a working museum piece and would never go down in value. It was a rolling 401k account. I noticed it also had no license plate but he drove it around the city several times a year. I suspected the fire truck was part of the reason why he was divorced too. To married couples a hobby-truck like that was often called a Divorcemobile.
Eventually, he pulled himself away from the engine compartment and found me in the back yard where they had a smoked whole hog spread out on a covered table. Grab a (1960s) stainless steel mess hall tray and tongs and pull your dinner off the bone. The meat was tender and juicy but plain, so he had ten bowls of BBQ sauces and stacks of paper towels. There were salads of every type and a keg of beer. We didn't drink AB beers because the extra hops gave us headaches. Both David and I were hops-sensitive and easily got headaches, and we never drank microbrew beers since they were usually heavy with hops. We were fine with western USA beers and Mexican beers, but nothing from AB. We usually ended up drinking Coors or Miller but there were others we could drink and not get headaches.
We got our trays loaded down with steamy pork and salads and two beers each. We sat in chairs in the back yard in a circle around a fire pit and chatted with twelve other couples. By tradition we had to stand and introduce ourselves to the group and say something about our jobs-education-family-etc, nobody mentioned the word gay, which was a good indicator about the gathered group. It was obvious what we were up to. I think we were the youngest couple attending their police-fire-friends party. They all seemed to know each other, and we were relative strangers. Almost everyone else looked to be 40-55 years old.
We set our trays on our chairs and sort of bowed and thanked the group of friends for the invite, "I'm David Larsen, this is Ryan Malone, we work for Uncle Sam. Like many of you we function as a two-man team and study crime and terror in North America. We're native Texans, you can probably hear from my accent, and we're both 29 years old. Graduated from UT Austin with Master's degrees in Engineering, and have worked together for about six years." I raised one hand and said Hi, and looked all around the circle even though it was rather dark, the only source of light being the campfire. It occasionally spit out a glowing ember so everyone paid close attention. Nearly everyone had their shoes off, around the fire pit was a ring of bare feet.
While we were standing one lady asked about our work, David answered.
"We're feds. We work for the DOD researching crime and prevention in the western USA."
Another guy, who looked to be in his late 40s, and in great shape spoke, "There's a rumor that you guys're CIA."
David laughed and said, "Nope, we work for the DOD and consult on security at power plants and other secure facilities. We interviewed with the CIA in college like most of our classmates but we never followed up. The DOD aggressively recruited us. What about you?" He gestured back at the blond haired gentleman wearing a polo shirt that showed off his upper arms and chest muscles. I was surprised he never mentioned almost a year with the Navy Seals.
"Umm, I went to school in Oklahoma, a bachelors in municipal admin. I run Station 27 up on McCombs that covers this addition." Then he got silent and shoveled more pork in his mouth. The guy (Mike) that invited us to the party carefully added two more pieces of split wood to the fire pit ensuring it didn't shoot up a mass of sparks and glowing embers. People complimented him on the pork, then I noticed a large smoker sitting in the dark behind the meat table. The hog was excellent, despite being plain. We quietly lifted our trays and sat down and devoured our food, same as everyone else. Once you got started eating his pork it was damn hard to stop. The skin was better munching than a bag of Doritos.
There was a stack of small plastic cups on the sauce table, and you used spoons to fill as many sauce cups as you wanted, I think I counted twelve different sauces; red, green, brown, white, and one that looked like chunky salsa but was actually barbecue sauce. Some were sweet and a few were marked HOT. By then others took over the conversation and we chowed down our large metal trays. Ten minutes later I saw David was nearly out of sauce so I set my tray on the ground and went back for more sauces. We both liked hot and sweet so I got four cups and two more beers. Someone by the table said the white one was home made Tzatziki sauce; she said it was great on almost anything, then added it was Greek. Another guy, I think he was in the FD said that Thousand Island dressing could be modified into all sorts of unique sauces. Someone else said the same was true of BBQ sauces that started off with basic Kraft BBQ sauce. It was the foundation for all sorts of award winning sauces in the USA. The conversation suddenly got loud and everyone wanted to say what simple things from the grocery store were the foundation for all kinds of custom sauces for everything from burgers, fries, and eggs on toast.
David looked at me and whispered that he liked Cholula on about everything, except my dick because it made his lips burn. I was chewing a mouth full of pork when he said it and nearly choked I laughed so hard. Never try to laugh and swallow food at the same time.
I considered having him on a blanket near the firepit and pouring Cholula into his belly button then using it to dip chunks of pork. I'd do it in our back yard if he'd let me. Then I got up for more beers from the pile we brought over.
David smiled and winked at me when I handed him the cold beer that dripped water on his arm, then two cups of sauce. His salads were already gone. I told him over Whispernet it looked like the hog was 80% gone. We both went back for more meat. Mike said we had to eat the entire thing, there was no room for it in the refrigerator.
One other guy at the fire asked us if we were active duty military. David answered, "Yes, as contractors, we are both Colonels but we don't wear the uniform and we don't salute except if I make a trip to the Pentagon in uniform." The guy asked, "So you do have uniforms?"
I said, "Yes, both of us but we only wear them in D.C. On the military bases around here we don't and we never salute. That pisses off a certain type of officer. Most of the ones we upset are junior officers."
One of them laughed and said, "Majors Burns and Hoolihan," and we all laughed. I added that we liked nabbing bad guys and riding in the desert. One of the guests raised his hand and formed a pistol and made like he was shooting at me, I don't think David saw it, but it was creepy. I just smiled back and nodded yes, I think he meant it to mean we killed bad guys, but didn't actually capture them. But that wasn't true, we captured a lot of felons that were turned over to law enforcement alive and unharmed.
We sat around the campfire and discussed recent events in the city, the cops liked to tell us about big cases they solved. The fire department guys countered with two recent structure fires on the northeast side. The guy that owned the ladder truck talked about how much a new truck costs today, closing in on a million bucks after you added all the extra gear.
Northeast El Paso didn't have many tall structures, the only tall building east of the mountains was the nine story VA Hospital. The hospital had sprinklers so it had almost zero chance of catching on fire. There were a few three story office buildings on our side but they were uncommon. Most apartments were two stories, except a few newer ones. They only got permits to build that tall in areas with a ladder truck company nearby, plus they all had sprinklers. There were very few bad fires in newer parts of the city. The biggest fire company in El Paso was downtown.
At 2030hrs some couples started to leave. At 2100 we were down to four couples and there were lots of empty chairs around the fire, he announced the hog was gone, we did a good job. Everyone applauded and a few rubbed their tummies. I felt stuffed and David tried to make silent burping sounds over Whispernet to make me laugh for no reason in front of a crowd. We'd had about six beers each, I went back to the ice chest and grabbed two Tecate beers and packets of salt.
When I went to the ice chest another guy stepped over and held out his hand, flashing two fingers. He was the guy that made the shooting gesture at me.
"What kind you want, they're all different?" I asked.
"I don't care, whatever." So I handed him two dripping wet cans of Coors. He said, "You guys work in the Fed office in the basement of the airport, right?"
I looked at him and nodded yes. He said he was a city cop and saw us run traffic lights on the way to the airport but never ran our plate.
I stood up and looked in his eyes and very quietly said, "If you run our plate it's supposed to say: 'Do not detain or question.' He said he's run hundreds of plates and has never seen one come back with that. Trying to hide my anger I stepped closer to him and said, "Its down the street dude, go run it." I smiled at him and pointed at the front door. He handed back the cans of Coors and walked out the front door. My guess was he walked down the street and called dispatch with his cell phone. Thirty seconds later she called him back and said it was registered to the DOD, Washington DC, 'Do not detain or question under penalties outlined in 36 CFR 2.32.'
About eight minutes later he re-joined the party and sat beside his wife, handed her a can of Coors and looked at me and smiled broadly. I smiled back but said nothing. To me he almost looked pissed off that we outranked him on the streets of El Paso. Of course he had no idea we had nuclear weapons in our house that could easily destroy eastern El Paso and Fort Bliss. I didn't want to get into a testosterone contest with him, but I felt very hostile vibes floating over the campfire. David seemed to notice too and commented over Whispernet.
'What crawled up his ass?' he asked bluntly.
I told my husband we had a brief encounter by the ice chests and I think he walked down the block and ran our truck plate to verify what I claimed. David said it looked like I stomped on his dick in front of his wife and kids. We decided to get his full name (and history) and do some research. Since he now knew where we lived it created danger for us. They came here in a four door Chevrolet Malibu parked by the fire truck. I could tell David was upset that I told him to go check our plate. I thought it would be safe since he was a high ranking cop.
We left at 10:25 and walked home after taking a photo of his wife's license plate. We crossed the street and walked home in the dark holding hands. In our subdivision there were only street lights at intersections so it got pretty dark. By the time we left the antique fire truck was gone too, it left hydraulic oil puddles on the street. It was a fifty year old vehicle so that's expected, maybe not as 'fully restored' as he claimed.
David said it dripped oil when he disconnected the hoses and connected them to the portable power unit.
At home we ran his plate, it came back to Mark Krull, a police detective on the far northeast side (north of Transmountain Road), but not our local precinct. We searched in the DOD computer and found he had two DUIs and domestic assault (over fifteen years). He was a suspect in a drug smuggling case when he was 20 years old but never prosecuted. David suspected he might be a 'double agent' for the cartels because his profile sounded familiar. There were supposedly five moles in the city cops. David searched even more and got his cell number, and his wife's too.
The next day we drove to our Captain's house and told him our suspicions, he took our printouts and said he'd quietly ask around within police management.
Six days later we got info back from the boss, our guy at the party was on a secret list of suspects that were giving information to the cartels. The cartels always seemed to know who had warrants and when their guys needed to remain south of the border. He was suspected of providing lots of police activity intel to enemies of the USA across the border. We devised a plan to make him disappear, quickly and easily, maybe something that involved feeding hungry vultures and coyotes. That was our standard method for making bad people disappear without a trace. In Tibet it was called a Sky Burial.
David decided to use the direct approach by inviting him to tour our office in the airport some evening. We got his email address and sent him an invite, called him by his first name, reminding him we met at the hog BBQ party (with many cops attending it was unwise to call it a Pig Party). Much to my surprise he accepted and set a date, this week Friday. We advised the OD not to accept alerts for us that evening, but business had been light for us recently. We warned the OD what we were possibly going to do, she put the back-up team in Omaha on ready-standby that evening.
David devised a plan, we'd tour him around the airport terminals, the control tower, and in the basement where the offices were, and then we'd put him in our truck and drive him out to the far end of the long runway. On the far east side of the airport sat an aviation radio direction transmitter, an oddly shaped building that sort of looked like an upside down ice cream cone. It had antennas all the way around but only a few people knew what a VORTAC was. It was a radio transmitter that guided airplanes to the airport, or locate themselves on a map.
Party time arrived, we met Mark upstairs in the terminal and showed him the main room where people purchased tickets, checked baggage, and bought food. Then we bypassed the TSA line and showed him the two terminals, with four gates each and then with my badge we went down stairs.
Part of the downstairs used to be the original terminal back in the 1950s but was now offices and baggage handling. There was only one passenger plane at a jetway, the rest of the airport was done for the day. Like we said, El Paso was not a hugely busy airport and didn't fly directly to many destinations (DFW, DIA, LAX, SAN, SEA, IAH, DAL, LAS, SAN, and once a week to ORD and back). There were some smaller airlines that flew to regional airports like Lubbock, Albuquerque, Las Cruces, Amarillo, and Corpus Christi.
After a brief trip to the control tower we walked Mark outside the door from our office onto the tarmac where he was immediately grossed out by the stench of jet fuel exhaust. We got into our truck and drove him out to the general aviation runway 26R, then on a dirt road to the VORTAC near the far east end of the longest runway (22), the one most airplanes used because it was 10,000 feet long.
I guessed David might provoke him into a fight but he never did. When I told him about the hand gesture Mark made at me it really pissed him off. David told me it was unwise to make threatening gestures at professional killers.
We parked by the VORTAC building and slowly walked around it. The directional antennas were a bit above head-height. Mark asked if it was safe being that close, I told him they were not very strong signals and we were too far away. As a joke David asked if he was done having children, and we all laughed. I told him if you got too close you could feel your nuts warm up.
David kicked around a few stones and pretended to be looking at the ground as we walked around the oddly shaped building, lit by a dozen red clearance lights under the starry desert sky. I explained how it sent out narrow radio beams that send angular information to a receiver in the aircraft so it could see what direction they were to that VORTAC.
In the distance to the northeast sat the new barracks complex for the Basic Training facility in the desert at Fort Bliss, to the northwest we could see the taxiway lights at Biggs Field. David casually wandered around as I explained all the desert sights, I was expecting to be warned over Whispernet but David silently stepped behind Mark, grabbed his head and yanked him backwards and smashed his skull on the cement walkway, the impact knocked him out. I heard his skull CRUNCH on the pavement, which was a creepy sound and left the guy on his back with his arms in the air, twitching. David aimed his face away and held out his hand. I handed him my unfolded knife and he jabbed his neck and stood up with one boot on his throat so the blood didn't spray all over.
Marks's body twitched and his arms acted like he was trying to grab something but it was just death throws.
After several seconds we dragged him by the ankles far into the desert towards the southeast, nearly 400 feet from the VOTAC. I sliced off his clothes and took them with me back to the truck. We left him (naked and face-up) for the buzzards and coyotes.
Back by the VORTAC we used a broom to bury the blood soaked sand. On the way home we told the OD the mission was completed.
Two days later two El Paso Police detectives arrived at our office wanting to question us about the disappearance of Mark Krull, we invited them in our conference room along with the Captain. We stated he toured the airport and left, end of story. One of them said we'd need to come to their station and write statements under oath. As soon as they said that the captain asked us to leave the room and he spoke to the detectives for about ten minutes behind a closed door while we sat with the OD and helped him get organized for the rest of the week.
The conference room door opened and the two red-faced detectives walked out without speaking and left. We never heard about the missing detective again. We offered to investigate the other cartel moles in the police department but the captain said that was enough for this year.
Four days later we got our first estimate from a factory in San Antonio about stamping prototype cans for our spider launchers. They would stamp cans of steel with a steel spring, pin, and latch inside in the center to hold the halves together with the spring wound with half a turn. They already had a tool and a coil of primered sheet steel, ideal for stamping steel cans. Both parts would be nearly identical except one half would fit inside the other. Outside it was three inches across, both halves were one inch tall. The wire spring inside was spring steel wire that would be spot welded inside one half. After those were done we would work out the magnet, the release mechanism, and how to secure three spiders inside.
Three weeks later we received a box of white half-cans, made to fit together and fit loose enough that one half could turn freely. The next step was to perfect the winding mechanism and the pin latch to hold the halves together. David already designed the hold-down mechanism that held the halves together and could be released by a tiny metal latch. The circuit pulled back a tiny pin that released the spring and shot the lid off the bottom (the bottom remained on the street). A magnet glued to the outside held it tightly to the vehicle body, and the spiders in their storage mode naturally gripped a tiny metal rod we glued inside the can in three spots, places for three spiders. To activate it you gripped a plastic strip and slowly pulled it out of the can, which connected the batteries on the spiders and the metal detector/firing circuit. On the lid were stamped two arrows, one to show direction to wind the spring, the second one where to stop winding. Rotate the arrow to the word stop, gently pull the plastic strip and set the can down on the ground with the magnet side up. Once the strip was pulled the spiders had fifteen minutes before they self destructed. One of them targeted the passenger compartment, the vehicle computer, and after six minutes it released pepper gas and self destructed.
The design was approved by Pentagon engineers and David applied for a patent on the can. We ordered another production run of cans and had them shipped to Nevada to go into production as a stand-alone weapon. The final product would be painted blue to look like ordinary fire hydrant reflectors on the street.
We took prototypes on the road to demonstrate them to our other teams with the back-up teams. The expensive part was having to arrange demonstration vehicles because each one was damaged. And getting someone to drive the car was also difficult. We often bought the cheapest used vehicle we could find, as it only needed to run for sixty seconds or less. The demonstrations were usually done on private airport runways or race tracks at night so there were no witnesses. The prototypes worked flawlessly. Some of our team sarcastically suggested we'd never again need to stop a fleeing vehicle now that we had the ideal weapon. We also tested it on a motorcycle but even if it was too small to activate the sensors, the can didn't stick and the spider probably couldn't find an ignition coil.
The other thing we tested them on was small general aviation aircraft, could it stop a plane on the runway. That test was also a big fail because they were mostly made of aluminum.
Contact the author: borischenaz at mailfence