Payback

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“You tense, Doctor?” Air Force Chief of Staff Michael Lesand asked the chief scientist from DARPA, Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. A dozen military and civil VIPs had gathered in the open in the ice-cold, pine-scented fall morning for the final test of DARPA’s latest expensive and most secret equipment project. If the test was successful, it would save countless American lives and justify the American taxpayers’ unwitting subsidization of the multimillion-dollar program. If it failed, heads would roll.

“Of course I’m nervous,” said the DARPA man. “I don’t know why you people from the Pentagon don’t trust us. We could’ve done this back in the Seattle lab.”

“I trust you,” said Michael Lesand, with an ill-concealed smirk. “It’s just that some of the Joint Chiefs and my other colleagues here have seen the difference between a controlled lab situation, where ideal windage, humidity, and a perfect dummy are used, and a dummy in typical outdoor battle conditions, like this morning, when you can’t jig with the variables. No offense.”

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