Chapter 368: Northrop Grumman Integrated has a Bad Day

Friday, June 8, 2007

It was 12:40am and I had a long way to go: south past Florida; west across the Gulf of Mexico, across Mexico itself and a hundred miles out into the Pacific; then north to LA. It was about 3,800 miles by my reckoning. Sunrise off LA was 5:30am, giving me five hours. That was an average of 760 mph - exactly Mach 1, which I was NOT going to attempt. I changed my intended route to cut across Florida and estimated that reduced the journey to 3,400 miles, giving 700 mph as the required speed. I could JUST get there in time, so I headed south.

#5: <We really should learn how to fly supersonically. With so much over-water travel we could've cut maybe two hours off our travel time.>

#11: <Agreed. It'd make life easier, presuming we still have a life after we tried it.>

I initially had to fly considerably slower than 700 mph so I could duck underwater quickly when a plane came streaking low over the water. There was nothing ominous about that, as there'd been planes flying around at low altitudes since the Freedom Plaza bombshell.

It only took me about fifteen minutes to work my way sufficiently south that I could start speeding up. Either the air traffic was reducing with increased distance from DC, or my email was having an effect. Probably just the former this early, I guessed.

Another fifteen minutes had me up to 700 mph a dozen feet above the water. It'd take me about six seconds at 6 g's to slow down enough to get underwater without making a too-large splash, by which time a fast moving plane could cover a lot of ground (water, in this case). So I not only had to concentrate hard on not letting any of the bumps get me into an unstable tumbling, but I had to concentrate on searching the sky too. Fortunately I'm very good at concentrating on many different things at the same time, although having more sight blobs would've been very helpful.

You might be amused to know that I flew feet-first, as rapid decelerations are more comfortable that way. My eyes were closed so it didn't matter which way my body was facing. It had taken me a while to get over the psychological weirdness of flying backward when I'd first started doing so several flights ago, but it was second nature to me now. Rather than mentally imagining that I was flying, my mental imagery was now that the sled was doing the flying and I was a passenger free to move around in it, so the position of my body on the sled was irrelevant.

Another recently acquired help was the discovery of how to adjust the friction of my NP-plates. Making the exterior surface of my flying sled frictionless reduced the drag and turbulence considerably. The turbulence wasn't totally eliminated, but a 95% reduction was wonderful, especially when flying 700 mph a dozen feet above very hard water.

I cut across Florida between Gainesville and Ocala, slowing down considerably because the land isn't as flat as the water and it'd hurt to fly into something. I paused at one place to do some quick research on Northrop Grumman's El Segundo facility. Google Earth showed me that it was bigger and more impressive than I'd imagined. Good.

I crossed Mexico about two hundred miles south of the US-Mexico border to avoid the surveillance in the border area. The US Border Patrol could VERY easily be using radars capable of detecting people! It would be bad if they detected one flying at 500 mph, that being my average low-flying, cross-country speed, when I'm not slowing down to steal a bottle of drinking water.

I'd originally intended to fly a hundred miles out into the Pacific before turning north, but I turned north only fifty miles out to sea because I had a timing problem: I'd picked up a little bit of extra speed during the trip. Partly from getting better with practice so able to put another fingertip or two into pushing, and partly from making small changes to the design of my sled - necessarily only small changes, because I REALLY didn't want to have a failed experiment 12 feet ASL at 710 mph! But despite the improvements, there'd been too much time lost to delays so I was running behind my optimistic schedule.

I wasn't going to get to LA early enough to fly over the Northrop Grumman facility in the dark, so it was going to have to be a daytime, land-based attack. That would normally mean angling into the land and borrowing another motorcycle so I could keep my helmet on. My target was three hundred miles directly north of me (although I was out to sea, LA was directly north because the American coastline conveniently bulges out to the west, which was geometrically obliging of it), but even being able to head straight to my target wouldn't get me there before daybreak. I'd be lucky to get another two hundred miles under my belt before dawn broke. If I angled toward the coast to reach it about two hundred miles from now, I'd be pushing my luck to get across the border by daybreak. People-detecting radars have a short range, but flying so close to the area where any border surveillance had to be the strongest would be inviting detection.

Having no choice, from dawn onward, today would have to be a day of submarine travel. It being so much slower, I had only flown fifty miles out from Mexico's coast. I kept flying north, which would be roughly parallel to the Mexican coast. There were several radar transmitters sending beams out here, but they weren't in a band that worried me because unlike my high-flying radio blob, my body was well below their horizon, thanks to the curvature of the Earth. The amount of signal reaching my body was far below the detection level. I wouldn't get any closer to land until I was well past the border, so the only thing I had to worry about was patrol boats, which my very large radio blob would see coming long before they could possibly see me or get me on radar if they had the necessary type.

The sun drove me underwater even earlier than I'd expected, probably because I was too used to the Cascade Range throwing a large shadow at dawn, which was something the Pacific Ocean didn't do much of. I submerged when I was about fifteen miles east of the southern tip of San Clemente Islands, which was about 75 miles from my target.

Since I was several hours of underwater travel away from my destination, I decided it was a good time to do the laundry. Seeing the cops at the roadblock out of DC use some sort of Geiger counter on people had been a reminder of the trace radiation issue. The undergraduate Physics courses I'd read - which was all of them that OSU had online - had included very little material about nuclear physics. Without wanting to be rude, a BS in Physics is useless for anything except doing an MS in Physics, as all the BS does is build a foundation. After doing all the BS reading, my physics knowledge is about as good as the state of the physics world 80 years ago, at best. That has no use, except as a base to add more knowledge to. I wouldn't be surprised if, after completing an MS in Physics I'd only be 25 years behind the times, because physics gets REALLY complicated! Anyway, I digress. My point is that I knew fuck all about "trace" or any other type of nuclear radiation.

#24: <Maybe we should've kept one of the bombs, so if we go on to do advanced Physics courses we could have a Show 'N' Tell that'd blow our classmates' minds, haha.>

I didn't know if I had picked up any trace radiation, whether it could be washed off, and even if there was such a thing as "trace radiation" from handling warheads, but in Hollywood movies the characters always have to strip and shower while being scrubbed with a broom, so I should do something similar just in case it was good for my health. Not that I feared the teensy amount of radiation possibly involved, but I did fear the Government learning that I was responsible for stealing five nukes and doing several billion dollars of damage to their military's equipment. I was pretty sure their discovering that I was to blame would be VERY bad for my health.

[[I was in less danger than other human beings from radiation damage because my cells were extremely good at repairing genetic damage. Having their energy supplied to them by the Universe freed the cells up from a major task, letting them perform their other tasks better. Obviously that was unintentional as individual cells don't possess brains to have intentions with; it was just a wonderful consequence of my cells not being so badly overworked as everyone else's. And I do mean that cells are OVERWORKED; you would NOT BELIEVE how busy cells are! Imagine every airport in the world, including the ones I'd recently put out of business, scaled down and inserted into a single cell, with all their flights taking off and landing on each other constantly, with time sped up as much as distance is scaled down. That's what the inside of each of your cells looks like on a slow day. Complete with crashes too. Thousands of times a day molecules fly straight through each cell's DNA strand, ripping holes in it. The cells' DNA repair mechanisms are busy little beavers (very little, and VERY busy).]]

I hadn't wanted to do the laundry in the Potomac as that hadn't been as clean as I would like, but fifty miles out to sea and twenty feet deep in the Pacific was pretty clean. And - I soon discovered - COLD. I'd stripped and was pushing myself through the water at about 5 mph while my hands and NP-fingertips rubbed my body to dislodge everything dislodgeable (and nothing that wasn't, which wasn't much because it was COLD!). I had other fingertips washing my clothes as they were being towed through the water. I didn't know whether I was achieving anything, but it sure woke me up!

Drying the clothes would require snorkeling to vent the moisture-filled air and replace it with dry air. I didn't want to do that while moving because it'd leave a noticeable wake. I could've stopped but I didn't see the need. I had an idea about what I'd do when I got to LA, and it probably included dumping these clothes because they might still be slightly radioactive. It might be better for me not to put them on again even if they were dry, so I decided to stay naked in my recreated submarine. It was centrally heated so I was quite comfortable.

My underwater sled was frictionless now, but water isn't noticeably compressible so my speed hadn't increased usefully, so it still took about four hours to get close offshore from the marina at Marina Del Rey. I'd hidden some clothes and cash here when I'd first appeared as Archangel Michael. I spent a couple of minutes looking for them but they appear to have been washed away, which didn't surprise or worry me as Plan B was so easy. There were quite a few boats passing in and out of the marina, each of which I searched and perhaps pilfered from, until I had everything I needed. I kept everything dry by dropping them into a hole in the ocean when the boat's occupant(s) were looking the other way. It was easy to arrange an NP-distraction if needed. It didn't take long for me to obtain a new set of long-sleeved, long-legged stretchy clothes, the top of which had a hood, a hat with a big brim, a large pair of dark sunglasses, colored sunscreen to disguise my face even further, a bag large enough to carry my helmet and dark sheet (the latter two items being new acquisitions obtained during my trip across Mexico), a towel, a book, a pair of sandals, some loose change, and a banana because I was hungry. I incinerated my old clothes and let the ash wash away as usual.

Dressed, with sunscreen applied liberally and fake NP-fat padding inserted under my clothes to further disguise myself, my submarine proceeded into the marina. There were hundreds of boats tied up and it was easy to find one parked where its stern was hidden by other boats around it and without any security cameras pointing its way. I unlocked and opened the little stern gate it had on its rear deck, and with a last sight blob check that the way was clear, I made like a seal at Marineland: rising out of the water and onto the ledge, sliding forward on my belly, low so no one could see me. The gate shut and locked behind me. From the boat's rear deck next to its cabin doors, I flipped my hoodie up, stood up with my bag, disembarked onto the jetty and strolled away.

There were security cameras operating, but I'd chosen my location carefully. At the worst, they'd have a tape of someone walking off a boat without there being a tape of that person walking onto it, no matter how far back they searched. They'd never bother doing that because no one would know that I'd been on the boat. Even if someone did look at the tapes with suspicion, I hadn't shown my face and my apparent build was very misleading.

I walked around the outside of the marina until I could get to the southern beach, then I walked down the coast, past the western end of LAX airport. After a 3.5-mile pleasant walk in the sand, I cut inland on Grand Avenue, then walked through El Segundo for about 2.5 miles until I neared the Mariposa Nash train station. The block east of that station is Northrop Grumman Integrated ("NGI"), the division that deals with UAVs. Northrop Grumman has several divisions in this area, but that was the one that was going to have a bad day.

As I neared the train station, I could tell that my 500-foot range wasn't quite enough. Seven hundred feet would've been perfect, but five hundred feet only covered 75% of the three buildings on NGI's block. So rather than walk into the station as I'd planned, I kept walking east along East Mariposa Ave. I was walking head down, hood up, reading my book. I appeared fatter than I really was and I walked with a limp because I was holding a small stone in one sandal. I even had an upside-down NP-bowl pushing up the inside of my hoodie to make me seem taller. All things considered, I didn't fear being identified from surveillance footage.

I used sight blobs to scope out the train station to ensure I knew the procedure for getting tickets, that I knew the destination I wanted (the next stop, Aviation Station), the price ($0.50), how often they ran (every twenty minutes), when the next train was due (eleven minutes), etc. Then I searched NGI's building. I was looking for:

• In particular, the operating panel for 'my' UAV. That was easy to find, as the one I wanted was being guarded and had documents lying around which identified the correct model of aircraft.

• In general, every other piece of electronics in the place. When the time came to do this, I wanted everything more expensive than a coffeemaker to be history.

As this was in the middle of LA, setting a big fire wouldn't be a good idea. I would crush rather than burn, so the job would take a while to do as I'd only have two 'teams': two sight blobs each with 3.5 tons of NP force available. Northrop Grumman Integrated occupied three multistory buildings. They weren't large buildings but there was still a lot of total floor area, and the company did a great deal of electronics work so there were many hundreds of crush-worthy targets. Searching the buildings now would make the job go quicker later.

I made a plan of the sequence of rooms I'd attack, starting with the room that contained the most expensive looking collection of electronics, and progressing toward coffeemakers (actually, I'd attack room by room and the coffee makers were spread around, but you get the idea). If I had time, I'd go back and get all the coffeemakers too, to send the company a clear message.

In the course of my searching, I noticed that they had quite a few safes. After seeing half a dozen of them I got curious and looked inside. They mostly contained computer media and some paper files. Onsite fireproof backups, by the looks of them. They'd surely have offsite storage too, but I still enjoyed going through all their safes and melting/burning everything inside them. Fireproof meant airtight, so I couldn't create much fire, but it also meant that no staff could tell that the materials the safes contained were being turned into ash or melted slag.

I would start one real fire, a small one for 'my' UAV's controller. It was going to be a pancake and then badly burned toast. I wanted to send a message about that too.

It only took me four minutes to finish the searching, which meant having to wait seven minutes before the train was due. Because I had to start the attack from the street, to meet the train I should wait about five minutes and then hit them as I started walking back to the station to catch the soon-to-arrive train. I decided that was too much time hanging around on the street and the train's timing might not be accurate either. Hanging around their block or walking away then back again wasn't much of a risk, but it was an unnecessary risk, so I changed my plan slightly.

I crossed to the other side of the street to be more unassociated when the fun started, and to disguise that I was changing directions to walk back to the west again. After I'd walked a hundred feet west, I made sure my body showed no change in motion as I started my attack.

It doesn't even take a second to 'stomp' something with 3.5 tons of force (or squeeze it, if that seemed more appropriate), and both the rooms I started in had many pieces of equipment in them, so their staff saw multiple and rapid stomp, stomp, stomp ... Having pieces of equipment being noisily squashed into flat wrecks in rapid sequence around the rooms REALLY freaked the staff!

My UAV's panel got the extra treatment, being stomped, pummel, ripped open, then the heat got poured into to, starting with only a few minds' worth and rising quickly to let the guards and the guys working on it feel the heat rising and to get away. I didn't need many minds for that, so the other minds were stomping everything else stomp-worthy in the room.

I didn't want to have the trail of destruction head west at the same pace I did, so I'd planned to have the stomping happen in my guess of descending value of rooms, and I'd stop my attack when I found myself out of range of the next location I wanted to stomp (well, I might do two or three more areas that were in range, but no more than that). The way it worked out, my attack lasted as long as it took me to walk three hundred feet, which took about 1.5 minutes. Each team could 'stomp' about 2 times per second, depending on how fast the cabinets collapsed, so that was a total of more than 360 stomps during the attack. Probably 450 pieces of expensive equipment got turned into scrap as sometimes one piece had been sitting on top of another, enabling me to get both of them in one stomp. It was one and half minutes of panic-inducing nightmare for the staff of Northrop Grumman Integrated - now "Northrop Grumman Disintegrated".

As a parting message, I successively picked up a couple dozen of the most expensive looking cars out of the staff parking lot and placed them in a big "sad face" on the roof of the largest building. I didn't damage the cars, merely relocated them. They'd be usable again once Northrop Grumman got them down off the roof. Half the staff looked like they were running home today anyway, judging by the way they were pouring out of the doors and not stopping. I was looking forward to seeing the "sad face" on the TV soon. Its connection to Archangel Michael's smiley faces would be obvious, and that it'd turned sad sent a clear message of the angel's opinion of recent events.