On my way to Timbuktu, I stopped to beer-up at a place where I overheard (translated): “There was no way past Homeland Security. Ben assigned me and Arturo to find a way in, and we did!”

His friend finger-indicated me. I could see these two guys in the mirror behind the row of reflected bottles. I was drinking this town’s home brew of beer. They were drinking strong coffee at the bar. The guy next to me at the bar turned to me away from his friend seated on his left. We sat on twisty barstools. The guy asked me the time in the same language they were just using. I didn’t respond, just kept a straight stare at my image in the bar’s mirror.

This man then grabbed my shoulder to turn me to face him, repeated the same question about what’s the time in that funny language they have. He saw my dumb expression, he shrugged, smiled, turned back to his friend. “It’s okay.”

But, of course, it wasn’t; I did understand those funny words. I eavesdropped and this is what I overheard…

“As I was saying, we found a way to send in our new stuff.” The man laughed a to-victory laugh, a winning laugh. “Arturo and me worked out the plan and took it to Ben who loved it. We stayed along as consultants.” Right after the man says this, I hear the man sigh.

“I’m interested, you know that. Just tell me what happened, but with less drama.”

“Okay, remember the story of the Trojan Horse? Well, we used Trojan Toys. We used two separate sets of Trojan Toys that were the main ingredients when combined and its catalyst was the passage of time itself.”

“Time?”

“Yes, time. Not clock time but calendar time. Given or taken several weeks, the years-long deflagration would go on everywhere in that country, erupting from anywhere there’s a garbage dump or a landfill which contained our new stuff, broken down. Ba-Boom! at subsonic speeds. The whole damn enchilada from coast to coast blows!”

I saw in the mirror the other man wave his hand, gesturing for his friend to continue.

“Arturo’s idea was to bring the pieces of Toy A and Toy B together, and so, in weeks in broken form, they would decompose, releasing Chemical A and Chemical B, and then wham! and this wham results in Ba-Boom! — skipping from one place to another to everywhere. As I said, the reaction spreads at subsonic speeds, and the cross-country explosions will therefore last, not for a couple of seconds, but continuously for years. Imagine being trapped in one of their unending, wild forest fires for weeks, but this is a fiery bitch that burns constantly for years. Hell — that’s what we would have created!”

“Hell, indeed. So what went wrong?”

“A woman”

“Huh?”

“A woman named Nancy Nord who works for some government bureaucracy over there — in product safety. She put the kibosh on the whole operation. We almost succeeded. We were trying with Toy A as Santa Claus and Toy B as Santa’s sleigh. Santa talks, the lights on the sleigh blink and the sleigh moves. And—-”

“I get it, batteries for power!”

“Yes, and all these Trojan Toys also contain a chemical agent to make the plastic toys shatter within two weeks of inserting their batteries.”

“And, and, well?”

“Volumes of the pieces from the sets of the two toys never made it to the trash cans like we anticipated. The whole plan failed once the first couple of toys shattered.”

“But why?”

The man reached into his inside pocket, brought out a newspaper clipping and handed it over to his friend. The man told him to read the headline.

His friend read aloud, “27.3 MILLION CHRISTMAS TOYS RECALLED BY THE U.S. CONSUMER PRODUCT SAFETY COMMISSION AFTER CHILD STABS HIMSELF WITH BROKEN-OFF PIECES.”

–end of speculative story.

Because of the Humpty Dumpty financial crisis, there’s certain to be cutbacks in government funds allocated to different agencies. Right? Well, actually, there should be increases in budgetary funds for the nation’s Consumer Product Safety Commission. There should also be an increase in badly needed personnel there, too, to handle the huge volume of work in inspecting products.

Nancy Nord, the chairman of the CPSC, has so far done a spend job with the skimpy resources she has had to work with, and I, for one, would like to have her stay on into the next administration to continue what she does best. Just recently, Nancy Nord has had 1.6 million dropside bed cribs recalled after 2 infant deaths.

“These cribs were manufactured in Taiwan and Indonesia and sold by major retailers including Wal-Mart, Kmart and Target.com, between January 1995 and September 2007. The recall also included 600,000 cribs of various models with spring-loaded safety pegs. These cribs were manufactured in China and sold between January 2000 and January 2007.
The recall doesn’t affect any cribs now in retail inventory.”
–MSNBC Oct. 21, 2008.

In my above short-short speculative story, I have tried to highlight Chemical Warfare as against the U.S. and why we Americans need to support the work of the CPSC and, of course, support our Homeland Security. This is a story about HWMD’s //HWMD is my own term for Hidden Weapons of Mass Destruction//because I wanted to demonstrate by example that these people of terroristana may posses and could use weapons other than nuclear to destroy our country.

I want to thank Nancy Nord for making a cameo appearance in my speculative story.

–30–