Power Play - Страница 2

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"See that red line?" he said. "That's the bond line between the skin and the spars, okay? About a quarter of an inch in."

"Cool," I said. "This is better than Xbox 360. Looks like you got a disbond, huh?"

"That's not a disbond," he said. "It's a kissing bond."

"Kissing bond," I said. "Gotta love that phrase." That referred to when two pieces of composite were right next to each other, no space between, but weren't stuck together. In my line of work, we say they're in "intimate contact" but haven't "bonded." Is that a metaphor or what?

"The C-scan didn't pick up any disbonds or delaminations, but for some crazy reason I decided to put one of them through a shake-table vibe test to check out the flutter and the flex/rigid dynamics, and that's when I discovered a discrepancy in the frequency signature."

"If you're trying to snow me with all this technical gobbledygook, it's not going to work."

He looked at me sternly for a few seconds, then realized I was giving him shit right back. "Fortunately, this new laser-shot peening diagnostic found the glitch. We're going to have to scrap every single one."

"You can't do that, Marty."

"You want these vertical stabilizers flying apart at thirty-five thousand feet with three hundred people aboard? I don't think so."

"There's no fix?"

"If I could figure out where the defect is, yeah. But I can't."

"Maybe they were overbaked? Or underbaked?"

"Landry."

"Contaminants?"

"Landry, you could eat off the floor here."

"Remember when some numbskull used that Loctite silicone spray inside the clean room and ruined a whole day's production?"

"That guy hasn't worked here in two years, Landry."

"Maybe you got a bad lot of Hexocyte." That was the epoxy adhesive film they used to bond the composite skin to the understructure.

"The supplier's got a perfect record on that."

"So maybe someone left the backing paper on."

"On every single piece of adhesive? No one's that brain-dead. Not even in this place."

"Will you scan this bar code? I want to check the inventory log."

I handed him a tag I'd taken from a roll of Hexocyte adhesive film. He brought it over to another console, scanned it. The screen filled up with a series of dates and temperatures.

I walked over to the screen and studied it for a minute or so.

"Marty," I said. "I'll be back in a few. I'm going to take a walk down to Shipping and Receiving."

"You're wasting your time," he said.

I found the shipping clerk smoking a cigarette in the outside loading area. He was a kid around twenty, with a wispy blond beard, wearing a blue knit beanie, even though it had to be ninety degrees out here. He wore Oakley mirrored sunglasses, baggy jeans, and a black T-shirt that said NO FEAR in white gothic lettering.

The kid looked like he couldn't decide whether he wanted to be surfer dude or gangsta. I felt for him. During the eighteen months I'd once spent in juvie-the Glenview Residential Center in upstate New York-I'd known kids far tougher than he was pretending to be.

"You Kevin?" I said, introducing myself.

"Sorry, dude, I didn't know you weren't supposed to smoke back here." He threw his cigarette to the asphalt and stamped it out.

My cell phone rang, but I ignored it. "I don't care about that. You signed for this shipment of Hexocyte on Friday at 1:36." I showed him a printout of the inventory log with his scrawled signature. He took off his sunglasses, studied it with a dense, incurious expression, as if it were Sanskrit. My phone finally stopped ringing, went to voice mail.

"Yeah, so?"

"You left early last Friday afternoon?"

"But my boss said it was cool!" he protested. "Me and my buddies went down to Topanga to do some shredding-"

"It rained all weekend."

"Friday it was looking awesome, dude-"

"You signed for it and you pulled the temperature recorder and logged it in, like you're supposed to. But you didn't put the stuff in the freezer, did you?"

He looked at me for a few seconds. My cell started ringing again.

"You picked a lousy weekend to screw up, Kevin. Heat and humidity-they just kill this stuff. There's a reason it's shipped packed in dry ice, right from the Hexocyte factory to here. That's also why they ship it with a temperature sensor, so the customer knows it was kept cold from the minute it leaves the factory. That's an entire week's work down the tubes. Dude." The cell finally stopped ringing.

The sullen diffidence had suddenly vanished. "Oh, shit."

"Do you know what would have happened if Marty Kluza hadn't caught the defect? We might have built six planes with defective tails. And you have any idea what happens to a plane if the tail comes apart in flight?"

"Oh, shit, man. Oh, shit."

"Don't ever let this happen again." My cell started ringing for a third time.

He gave me a confused look. "You're not telling my boss?"

"No."

"Why-why not?"

"Because he'd fire you. But I'm thinking that you'll never forget this as long as you live. Am I right?"

Tears came to the kid's eyes. "Listen, dude-"

I turned away and answered my cell phone.

It was Zoл. "Where are you?"

"Oahu. Where do you think I am? Fab."

"Hank Bodine wants to see you."

"Hank Bodine?"

Bodine, an executive vice president of Hammond Aerospace and the President of the Commercial Airplanes Division, was not just my boss. He was, to be precise, my boss's boss's boss. "What for?"

"How the hell do I know, Landry? Gloria, his admin, just called. He says he wants to see you now. It's important."

"But-I don't even have a tie."

"Yeah, you do," she said. "In your bottom drawer. It's in there with all those packages of instant oatmeal and ramen noodles."

"You've been in my desk, Zoл?"

"Landry," she said, "you'd better move it."

3

I'd met Hank Bodine a number of times, but I'd never actually been to his office before, on the top floor of the Hammond Tower in downtown Los Angeles. Usually I saw him when he came out to El Segundo, the division where I worked.

I waited outside Bodine's office for a good twenty minutes, flipping through old copies of Fortune and Aviation Week & Space Technology, wondering why he wanted to see me. I kept adjusting my rumpled tie and thinking how stupid it looked with my denim shirt and wishing I'd taken a couple of minutes to change out of my jeans and into a suit. Everyone here at Hammond world headquarters was wearing a suit.

Finally, Bodine's admin, Gloria Morales, showed me in to Bodine's office, a vast expanse of chrome and glass, blindingly bright. It was bigger than my apartment. I'm not exaggerating. There was even a wood-burning fireplace, which he'd had installed at enormous expense, though there was no fire burning in it just then.

He didn't get up to shake my hand or anything. He sat in a high-backed leather desk chair behind the huge slab of glass that served as his desk. There was nothing on it except for a row of scale models of all the great Hammond airplanes-the wide-bodied 818, the best-selling 808, the flop that was the 828, and of course my plane, the 880.

Bodine was around sixty, with silver hair, deep-set eyes beneath heavy black brows, a high forehead, a big square jaw. If you'd met him only briefly, you might call him distinguished-looking. Spend more than two minutes with him, though, and you'd realize there was nothing distinguished about the guy. He was a bully, most people said-a big, swaggering man with a sharp tongue who was given to explosive tirades. Yet at the same time, he had a big, bluff charisma-a kind of Jack Welch thing going on.

Bodine leaned back, folding his arms, as I sat in one of the low chairs in front of his desk. I'm not short-just over six feet-but I found myself looking up at him as if he were Darth Vader. I had a feeling the setup was deliberate, one of Bodine's tricks to intimidate his visitors. Sunlight blazed in through the floor-to-ceiling glass behind him so I could barely make out his face.

"What's the holdup at Fab?"

"No big deal," I said. "A bonding problem in the vertical stabilizer, but it's taken care of."

Was that why he'd called me here? I braced myself for a barrage of questions, but he just nodded. "All right. Pack your bags," he said. "You're going to Canada."

"Canada?" I said.

"The offsite. The company jet's leaving from Van Nuys in five hours."

"I don't understand." The annual leadership retreat, at some famously luxurious fishing lodge in British Columbia, was only for the top guys at Hammond-the twelve or so members of the "leadership team." Certainly not for the likes of me.

"Yeah, well, sorry about the short notice, but there you have it. Should be plenty of time for you to pack a suitcase. Make sure you bring outdoor gear. Don't tell me you're not the outdoors type."

"I do okay. But why me?"

His eyes bored into me. Then the ends of his broad mouth turned up in an approximation of a smile. "You complaining?"

"I'm asking."

"Jesus Christ, guy, didn't you hear about the Eurospatiale disaster?"

The crash at the Paris Air Show, he meant. "What about it?"

"Right in the middle of the aerial demonstration, the pilot was forced to make an emergency crash landing. An aileron ripped off a wing at thirty thousand feet and smashed into the fuselage."

"An inboard flap, actually," I said.

He looked annoyed. "Whatever. The piece landed smack-dab on the runway at Le Bourget about six feet from Mr. Deepak Gupta, the chairman and managing director of Air India. Almost killed the guy."