Wry Martinis

by Christopher Buckley

  What you will find out about ramming is that it is counter-reflexive. All your life you’ve been hitting the brakes when you see a car stopped in front of you. Here they tell you to align either your right or left front wheel with the center of the other car’s rear (usually) axle, to downshift into first gear one-and-a-half car lengths away, then to hit the accelerator and to stay on the accelerator so that the other car absorbs the energy of the crash, not yours. You will do this twice during your three days at BSR. You will like it better the second time. The first, you’re too busy concentrating on keeping your head from going through the windshield, which Angel assures you it won’t, but you do not entirely believe him.

  My classmates were natural rammers. They got the hang of it right away. One was with the Department of Labor’s Inspector General’s office, here so he would be able to drive the Secretary of Labor through harm’s way. I could not for the life of me remember when an attempt had last been made on a Secretary of Labor, but who am I to begrudge the lovely Lynn Martin and her successors this consolation?

  The others did not pass out business cards, or even last names. They were lean, fit, had short haircuts and Berettas. They were not in the least put out by the photographs of German industrialist roadkill, and when it came my turn to be ambushed, they shot me upside the head easy as pie, though they were considerate enough to say afterwards, “Sorry about killing you. Shoulda seen your face.” Yuk, yuk.

  I was not able to get a straight answer from Calvin Frye, who at the time was director of training programs at BSR, as to just who these cheery killers were, but I was able to determine that BSR is where they all send their people for special driver’s ed: all branches of the military and government agencies, CIA, et cetera, et cetera. American executives come here as well, especially the ones who get those plum overseas postings that come with the name tags saying, “HELLO MY NAME IS JIM. MY COMPANY WILL GLADLY PAY MANY U.S. DOLLARS IN RANSOM.”

  There are other executive training schools. The advantage of BSR—aside from the fact that it comes with a two-mile, ten-turn racetrack upon which you will have a gas—is that this is where all the feds go to train. The instructors have security clearances, meaning that they get state-of-the-art antiterrorism input from the agencies whose people they train. They don’t pass along classified information to noncleared clients, but the expertise they impart is based on it.

  The key theme of the course is: force the bad guys to pick on someone else. The way to do that, of course, is to make yourself a difficult target. Vary your route to the office every day, never set patterns, spend the five to six minutes every morning to see if they’ve wired a mercury switch and C-4 to your windshield wiper, phone in fake restaurant and airline reservations, change your plans constantly, and at the last minute, reschedule, cancel again. “If you can get them to pick another victim,” said Cal during the Attack Recognition class, “then you’ve been 100 percent successful. Once you’re attacked, your chances of survival are about 10 percent.”

  “All right, suppose I throw you in the trunk,” said Bruce during the Vehicle Security exercise, showing us how to detect car bombs. “What do you do?” Damn good question there, Bruce, and hell if I knew. Suffocate? Wet my pants? Bruce reached into the side of the trunk, pulled out the two wires leading to the electric hood latch. With a pocketknife, he cut through the insulation and then pressed the wires together, shorting the circuit. The latch popped open. What if you don’t have a knife? “Use your teeth,” said Bruce. Better yet, carry a penknife.

  We found a half-dozen bombs in the car, under the hood, on the exhaust, attached to the windshield wipers, underneath the seat, in the headrest. They kept going off before we found them, too. The bombs consisted of ten-inch-long sections of dowel painted red to simulate sticks of TNT, and Play-Doh to signify C-4, attached to mercury switches, heat sensors and plain old plastic traveling alarm clocks. Angel gave the lecture on bombs, demonstrating some seventeen different kinds. Once you learn how, it only takes five to six minutes to safety-check a car, using just a small 40,000-candlepower Maglite and a plastic tie as a probe.

  Every time Angel introduced a different bomb, he’d say, “Now this one’s my favorite.” See that can of Coke on the backseat floor? “Pick it up, and next thing we’ll be reading about you in the newspaper, in orbit up there with Sputnik.” Ever heard of a “Firefly”? I’ll refrain from divulging the precise recipe here, but it’s pathetically simple to make: you fill a gelatin capsule with a certain household chemical and drop it down the gas tank. The water in the bottom of the tank will melt the gelatin, the chemical will make contact with the metal, causing a spark, causing the car to turn you into ground chuck. This seemed to me a darn good argument for locking gas caps, but Angel said no, no, “Those only keep honest guys out of your gas tank.” What you do is dust the cap—as well as the door handles—with talcum powder. If that dust looks disturbed the next morning, take a cab.

  Angel said he plays “the dumb American” when he picks up his rent-a-car at foreign airports: makes them drive it up to him at the curb, then asks the guy to open the hood, show him the spare, the dipstick, battery. If the guy won’t open the hood, “get the hell away from the car.” (I wonder how this is going to play at the Budget Rent A Car counter at LAX.)

  Rental cars are an inside joke here. The BSR fleet consists of second-hand Chevy Caprice police cruisers, specially fitted with 350-horse V-8 engines, Rochester Quadrajet carburetors, Bilstein gas shocks, NASCAR-grade stock-car wheels, sway bars and chrome moly axles. It is possible that the family car is not so neatly equipped, so we were advised to think twice before we went home and started pulling bootlegs and J-turns in the driveway. (Respectively, forward and reverse 180-degree turns, done at about 40 mph. The name comes from the inventors of the techniques.) At this point, Bruce grinned and, with a twinkle in his steely blues, said, “Why do you think God invented rent-a-cars?”

  After a thoroughly enjoyable hour of doing bootlegs and Js, spreading rubber on the track like so much soft butter, it was time for the Barricade Confrontations. These were ambushes, basically. On us they used .22 caliber blanks; on advanced students they use 12-gauge shotgun blanks, which, Bruce said, “tends to increase the stress factor.” After getting shot twice in the head, my stress factor did not need increasing. What it needed was a stiff drink. Before that could be achieved, though, there was the High Speed Pursuit, in which we drove around the track at 100 mph with instructors following close behind, blowing their horns, swerving, and bumping into our rear fenders. Contrary to the movies, they tell you here, most high-speed chases end with the pursued person crashing within two minutes or two miles. After the exercise, this did not come as a surprise to me. But there are things you can learn to make yourself faster. A car race, Bruce said, is won by the person who comes out of the turns fastest. It is also essential not to go into the turn too fast, and to come off your brake as you start your turn. “That’s the difference,” said Bruce, “between a mechanic and an artist.”

  The lecture the next morning on Surveillance Detection was given by Andy, twenty-seven years old, affable and boyish looking, with ten years in the Marines, including tours at the JFK Special Warfare Center and, I think, with Delta Force, the elite of the elite antiterrorists. (BSR, I got the feeling, is fairly thick with Delta grads.) He was determinedly close-lipped about his experiences, except to allow as how they had been “practical.”

  Predictability, he emphasized, is the cardinal sin. Two people, he said, were snatched in Beirut during their routine golf game. (Is nothing sacred?) He was critical of Brig. Gen. Dozier, the U.S. Army general who got nabbed by the Red Brigades in Verona in 1981. “He was not the prime target,” he said. “He was not even the secondary target. He was the tertiary target. He was the easiest. He PT’d (Physical Training) every morning on the dot at six.”

  He brought up an assassination attempt on General Trujillo. The gunmen struck while he was on his way to his regular assignation with his
mistress. “Your principal,” said Andy, “may try to hide this aspect of his life from you.” Unwise, definitely. If no man is a hero to his valet, he sure as hell should not try to be one to his bodyguard. I thought back to a misty night in Washington when my wife and I saw a cabinet official walking up a side street toward a hotel. Here was a man with a security detail nearly the size of the president’s, and he was completely alone. He kept his head down, avoiding eye contact, and the collar of his raincoat pulled up. What a nifty challenge it would have been for his press secretary to explain why he was found full of holes, naked and covered with Dom Pérignon in a suite at the Four Seasons.

  The portion of Andy’s lecture that dealt with Route Analysis was for the benefit of chauffeurs and bodyguards. Eighty percent of all terrorist incidents occur at the “chokepoints”—and almost always on the way to the office. The human element fails us once again: we’re always running a little late, no time to vary the route this morning.

  Fleeing the ambush is indeed heartily recommended, but only twice in the history of attacks have the bad guys given up the chase. (Tenacious little pricks, these terrorists.) And since your chances, as the pursued, of eluding them for more than two minutes or two miles are not favorable, you will want to have a preplanned response. This basically means preselecting whither precisely you will flee.

  Should the unpleasantness be occurring in an Arab country, Andy counsels against running to the nearest mosque. “Those places have a higher meaning,” he said in his Georgia drawl. “You want to get away from that.” He did advise driving your car into the nearest bank—literally, that is, through the front door. The drawback being that “the guard might shoot you, and the police might be pissed off at you.” You could also throw a rock through a jewelry store, a definite attention-getter. Or run to a “high-density environment,” like “an elementary school.” (“U.S. EXECUTIVE HIDES FROM ATTACKERS IN KINDERGARTEN; 17 CHILDREN SLAIN!”) As to shouting for help, he said it’s better to yell “Fire!” than “Help!” Why? “Because it involves them.”

  The last day of the course was spent driving in a van through the streets of nearby Winchester, Va., while we tried to figure out who was “surveilling” us. Everyone, we paranoiacally assumed: mothers in Volvo station wagons, old ladies—surely they didn’t think we were so dumb as to think those things in their ears were hearing aids?—tattooed biker types leaning against fences, a father and his three-year-old daughter parked outside a pediatrician’s office—ha! did they think we were fools?—and everyone in every phone booth we passed. We wrote down their physical descriptions and the time of sighting, just as Andy had instructed us, to determine any patterns.

  There are some tricks to Surveillance Detection. One is to wait until the light turns red, then go through and see who follows (other than annoyed cops, that is). If you’re on foot, go into a restaurant, order a meal, prepay and pretip the waiter, then bolt, leaving the “surveillant” stuck with his tab. Oh, and if it’s a Latin country, be sure to try this one: head for the nearest gay bar, leaving your macho surveillant too embarrassed to follow you in, presumably after fighting off a half-dozen Carmen Miranda wannabes.

  Most of the people we were convinced were tailing us turned out to be “ghosts,” which is to say, they weren’t. On the third and final run through town, Andy dropped hints about where the ambush would occur. Being a surveillant is the most boring job in the world, definitely entry-level terrorism. But that doesn’t mean they’re asleep. On the contrary, these people are looking to move up the terrorist career ladder. They’re on the ball. General Haig was under surveillance for a month before the cranky Euro-terrorists blew up his motorcade outside Mons, Belgium, in 1979. The Basque separatists spent three years planning Spanish Premier Carrero Blanco’s 1973 assassination. (Based, incidentally, on the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II by the Narodnaya Volya.) The Uruguayan Tupamaros who nabbed Sir Geoffrey Jackson in 1971 actually practiced on his car. The surveillance of the two U.S. Air Force colonels killed in Tehran in 1975 was so painstaking that the planners painted footprints for themselves on the ground at the attack site.

  The diligence has to cut both ways. Following its bloody but unsuccessful attack on Maggie Thatcher in 1984, the IRA passed this message to the British government: “You have to be lucky every time. We only have to be lucky once.” Probably the most conspicuously unsuccessful graduate of the BSR course was U.S. Marine Lt. Col. William Higgins, who while serving with the U.N. observer force in Lebanon was kidnapped, tortured and, probably, hanged. His captors, driving a brown Volvo, forced his Jeep Cherokee off the road with a basic blocking maneuver. The terrorists confused pursuing Israeli troops by deploying five brown Volvos in the area.

  The most conspicuously successful BSR graduate is probably a certain U.S. diplomat who was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo in 1988. He and another man were driving through town one day when a Peugeot sedan started to pull up beside them. Three things were not right about the Peugeot. First, everyone inside was sitting on the left. Second, all the windows were down (in an air-conditioned car, in Cairo?). Third—this was the clincher—the driver was wearing mufflers over his ears. (No sense in losing your hearing over a couple of American diplomats.)

  The diplomat and his passenger ducked and gunned their car forward. The attackers opened fire with submachine guns. The diplomat was shot in the neck, but he kept control. He drove up onto a sidewalk, where another gunman was waiting. He did what they train you to do here: not to reach for your gun, but to use the car as a 4,000-pound bullet. It works. The gunman jumped out of the way rather than end up as tread jam. The diplomat and his companion got away from their pursuers, members of a group that had specialized in killing Israeli diplomats in Cairo.

  “We call that incident a failure,” said Cal, “because the whole point is to avoid being attacked.” Andy mentioned another instance in which a woman graduate “drove into her attacker and cut him in half, then did a J-turn and got out of there.” Sounded like a success to me, but “No,” he said, “she should have kept right on going through him.” They’re tough graders here.

  As we approached the chokepoint, we saw it pull out behind us, a brown Volvo, oddly enough. And there, up the street in a phone booth was the same guy in the Hawaiian shirt whom we’d seen earlier, standing on a corner. And there, pulling out in front of us was the same, white four-door sedan. It turned to block us. The Volvo had us boxed from the rear.

  “Okay, what do I do?” Andy asked.

  “Ram,” said one of the guys in the back.

  “Which end?”

  “Front.”

  “Nope. The trailing end. Always go for the trailing end, unless you have no other choice.”

  Suddenly a nice-looking woman, maybe the wife of one of the BSR instructors, and a cute little seven-year-old girl popped out of the shadows. They aimed sticks at us and went bang bang. The guys in the back knew exactly how it would all play out. They just smiled at the mom and little girl and went bang bang with their fingers.

  “You figured it out,” said Andy to his soldier-students, “and that’s the difference between someone who’s going to live and someone who won’t.”

  —Forbes FYI, 1992

  I Vísítz

  the Nímítz

  It is hunched and hot inside the Grumman Trader, nickname: “Blue Ghost.” I’m wearing my cranial, an abbreviated helmet with goggles, and my Mae West. Deflated, it looks more like a Twiggy. The crew chief passes a cup of coffee. Below, the Gulf Stream is gray-green and flecked with chop.

  Our seats face backward. At the far end of the cabin the sign on the door is not inviting: a European-style traffic sign showing a man peeing in silhouette. The pee, traced by a broken line, arcs onto the floor short of the toilet. A red diagonal slash is superimposed over the silhouette. It is not clear what is going on.

  “WHAT DOES THAT SIGN MEAN?”

  To talk you have to pull on the ear cups and shout.

  The crew chief
shouts back that the plane is usually bouncing around and most people miss the toilet. So they have an attachment.

  “KIND OF LIKE A FUNNEL.”

  “I SEE.”

  “WE HAD A HARD TIME COMING UP WITH A SIGN.”

  A few minutes later he gives us the prelanding prep, an attention getter beginning with, “IF WE DITCH—” The possibility seems more remote when stewardesses explain it.

  The pilot banks left and I catch my first glimpse of CVN-68, aircraft carrier Nimitz. We think of aircraft carriers as immense, and they are. This one is a fifth-of-a-mile long, almost as long as the Empire State Building is tall. There’s a Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not quality to nuclear aircraft carrier statistics. She only needs refueling every thirteen years. Her last fill-up cost $100 million. (Comes out to something like $133 per mile.) She sleeps 6,100 people. A single link of her anchor chain weights 365 pounds. What we have here is 95,000 tons of U.S. airpower projection. We are talking Big Floating Stick. Carrier aviation has come a long way since Eugene B. Ely took off in a biplane from an eighty-five-foot boardwalk built onto the bow of the U.S.S. Pennsylvania in 1911. But from 800 feet up, that four-and-a-half-acre flight deck looks awfully small.

  I was told to press my body against the seat. The water got closer and closer. Then suddenly it became flight deck. Bump. The hook grabbed the cable and we went from ninety knots to zero in less than two seconds. All very smooth.

  The flight deck of a carrier is, as one officer puts it, “the most dangerous place on earth.” There is an interesting variety of ways to die. One is having 50,000 pounds of F-14 or A-6 land on you. Men have been blown off the deck; sucked whole into the inlet ducts of jet engines. (Pity the poor swabbos who have to clean up after that.) The most gaping of these maws belongs to the A-7E Corsair light attack bomber. It looks like the mouth of a great white shark that’s had all its teeth pulled.