Page 43 of Eruption
He turned to address Briggs. “The problem is that these arrays have to be self-timed, using sensors within the blastmaterial to give feedback to the computers that control the sequencing. So once it starts, it just keeps going.”
“And you can get this ready in four days?”
“No, sir, we can’t. We need a minimum of seven days for computer programming.”
Briggs said, “We don’t have seven days.”
“I’ve been listening, sir. I’m aware that we don’t.”
“So what are you telling me?”
“We need to outsource this job. A few commercial demolition companies have proprietary software for sensors. They don’t need programming time because their computers are hard-coded to do it themselves.”
“Whom do you suggest?”
“We think the best is Cruz Demolition, out of Houston. They’ve done a lot of work for the army, and they’re fast as hell.”
“How long to get them here?”
“Actually, sir, they have a team on-island now.”
“What? Here?”
“Honolulu. I believe they’re blowing up a building next to a shopping center.”
CHAPTER 27
Ala Moana Center, Honolulu, Hawai‘i
One minute and counting, Becky.”
Rebecca Cruz sighed and shook her head as she spoke into her microphone to her brother David.
“You know better than anyone, because I’ve punched you out over this more than a few times, that I hate being called Becky,” she said.
“Why do you think I do it?” he asked.
“I’d like to be even closer,” Becky said.
“You always want to be as close to the action as possible,” he said. “But any closer than this and it’s not safe.”
“Safe is no fun,” Becky said.
“Shut up,” David Cruz said.
It was pounding rain in Honolulu; water was running in a continuous stream off her baseball cap. She felt as if she werestanding underneath a waterfall. And Rebecca Cruz didn’t like this one little bit.
She was standing in the huge upper parking lot of Ala Moana, staring up at the building they were about to blow. Ordinarily she liked rain on these jobs. Kept the dust down and the crowds small. But at the moment, there was no crowd at all, so the rain that had been falling for the past fifteen minutes could just freaking stop now.
She felt completely alone, a slender young woman wearing an orange construction slicker. With her pretty face and dark ponytail, she would have looked like a high-school cheerleader if it weren’t for her wire-frame glasses, which she wore more for effect than for the slight improvement in her distance vision. She thought they made her look older and more serious. More like the boss that she was.
The glasses were spattered with water now, and she didn’t even bother trying to clean them. She just lowered her plastic safety goggles over the glasses.
Ala Moana was the biggest outdoor shopping mall in the United States and now—Stop me if you’ve heard this one before,Rebecca thought—it needed room to grow. That was why Cruz Demolition was about to take down the Kama Kai office tower next to the mall. The fifteen-story structure had been built in the 1990s, a quick-and-dirty job by a local contractor who’d bribed officials liberally, enabling him to use construction techniques that David said he wouldn’t even call substandard because that would be insulting to substandard techniques.
They had hardwired this job, mostly because they’d had no choice with so many radio taxis around. But that meant using about six miles of electrical cables held together by a lot of screw connectors. And if just one cable lying in a rain puddle shorted out—
Her radio headset clicked. David again.