FanStory.com - Truckin, Ch 7by Wayne Fowler

In the last part Clyde was moved by radio music as well as by a phone call from his son, Rick.

Chapter 7

One day, sitting in a diner where Clyde doubted any trucker could park, he watched the traffic on the business section of the highway, noting how many truckers used their engine brakes instead of regular brakes. Clyde recalled with a grin how Jane Ann had wanted him to petition the County Judge to get a No Jake Brakes sign on the road near their home. He determined to add that to his punishable offense list.

Hunting was getting harder. There were offenders, but getting them alone was nearly impossible on I-95 up the eastern seaboard. And when he did, it seemed every dark sedan was an escort, ready to bust him. He knew that most of his fear was paranoia, but was reasonably certain that not all were. The horse was bucking him off, despite his Florida success.

He thought about reverting to his days before the war, back when he dealt with annoying truckers less aggressively. For years, Clyde’s toolbox was limited to paybacks less lethal, simply pulling in front of offending truckers and slowing them down, as slow as thirty-forty miles an hour. When they’d try to pass, he would change lanes in front of them. Once, he infuriated a driver so badly that the trucker followed him off the freeway. Clyde intended to slip in behind the trucker to see whether his behavior had changed. The trucker was prepared to fight, more than likely with a gun. Clyde sped off. Leaving the trucker to seethe.

What truckers on YouTube call brake-checking, Clyde termed just slowing him down, making him shift gears, when possible. Pull in front, hit the brakes, use the gas when necessary to avoid a collision, and let the guy know he’d aggravated him.

To revert to those tactics now, when he couldn’t effectively isolate an offender, would be far too dangerous, allowing truckers to record his license plate and a description.

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“One-ten, maybe,” the Geeky guy said. “Two-twenty would prob’ly take out the neighborhood, at least a couple others, anyway. You don’t wanna do that, you the only one in the building not affected, you know?”

Clyde’s story was that he wanted to jam up, or short-circuit an apartment neighbor’s obtrusive electronics. “The kid wouldn’t listen to reason, the manager was scared of the guy, etcetera. He didn’t want to move, being there over twenty years and the new guy only there a few months. If he went to the law, the guy would probably poison his dog, blah, blah, blah.” Clyde’s hyperbole was in overdrive. He felt he could convince the Pope to murder the people in the non-existent next-door apartment.

“You ever hear of the Havana Syndrome?”

“I don’t want to make him sick,” Clyde replied.

“No, I mean, it’s like that, but well, more like a neutron bomb. You know, the one that the Russians have that will knock out every solid state in the city – nothin’ works, not even your toaster. Oh, the Russian bomb kills people and leaves all the infrastructure – so they move right in with all your stuff, you know?”

Clyde’s frown spoke for him.

“Well, not that extreme, but you want somethin’ in between, a simple jamming device.”

“Is there such a thing?” Clyde asked.

“Not over the counter,” he said with a winking brow that was intended to convey any sort of conspiracy theory. “There was a guy who invented a sound wave interrupter. He wanted to nullify the sound waves of jet engines by shooting negating sound waves back at the engine, like opposing waves on an oscilloscope.”

Clyde held silent.

“Didn’t work ‘cause it inhibited performance, affected the electronics somehow.”

The man gave Clyde the eye, wondering if he was the one he'd heard about in the news, the Turnpike Terrorist. Silently winking to himself, he decided to erase the day's surveillance tape, having already sided with anyone willing to take on obnoxious truckers.

Clyde spent the next month on the internet, erasing searches once printing out what might be useful, burning paper copies once put to memory. After he was finished, he wished he’d done all the computer work at a library. In his garage, he became mechanically and electronically handy, and a favorite customer of Harbor Freight, and then Lowes, and Radio Shack, the last Radio Shack in the state, the associate said.

The completed project, housed in a steel box to contain the resulting product and protect his own electronics, weighed nearly two hundred pounds and required disassembly before mounting into a vehicle. Clyde did not doubt that someone with more competence could devise a miniaturized version, a more sophisticated and efficient machine – but it worked. And no one knew about it except himself.

His new hard hat properly scuffed, and his two-year-old F-150 fitted with a secure and lockable bed cover, Clyde went to work rigging the license plate cover device, requiring a contortion of pulleys and cable work. After several failed efforts, he finally shaped a more or less parabolic cone to fit the oval tailgate Ford logo, shooting through the plastic as if it wasn’t even there.

The intermittent flow of microwaved bursts of ions, facilitated by a clever arrangement of a simple personal fan and metal ductwork, the effective range he estimated to be about fifty feet, give or take. Sufficient to fry electronics in the engine compartment, the cab, and sorry to say, also the refrigerator cooling the contents of a refrigerated trailer. Oh well.

But it could not operate on a twelve-volt automobile system. It needed household one-ten. Thus, the need for a pickup truck. With an array of deep motorhome, or marine six-volt, deep batteries connected to the truck’s charging alternator, with a transducer, a transformer, and inverter, before and after the device in series, respectively, the outfit gained an additional four hundred pounds. Again, the pickup truck with the high power, heavy-duty package.

With the back glass tinted to blackout strength, the license plate cover operating smoothly, he tested the device on a junker with a CB radio purchased from a scrap yard and a cheap burner cell phone. The first test was from fifty feet. Shooting directly out the tailgate, he would have to pass his prey, easing in front of it in a manner not to alarm, or cause a trucker to immediately change lanes to avoid a collision. He wanted to direct the blast at a diagonal, allowing him to remain in a passing lane, but without further engineering … maybe through the tail light lens. Next time home he would experiment, but for now he was becoming more anxious by the day. He felt that truckers were getting away with murder as he sat and tinkered.

From fifty feet, he stopped the cell phone and the radio, but not the engine. Experimenting, he laid on the trigger for longer and longer durations before attempting from a closer distance. He fried the transformer. The longer burst also brought the battery array to dangerously high temperatures. A fire or explosion would be bad. Not being a real electronics expert, though more educated by the day, it took hours to isolate the problem. He bought two replacements, just in case. Finally, he determined that five seconds at forty feet should get the job done. Though with the variety of configurations, gauges of steel, and other plating materials between his blaster and the electronics of the various models and manufacturers of trucks, he wasn’t sure. He put a rifle barrel hole in the side window and packed the .22 just in case.

The last thing he did was to outfit his truck with a CB radio, wondering why he hadn’t thought to do it earlier. Hearing truckers’ chatter on channel nineteen could be helpful.

His first opportunity, forced somewhat – too bad for the barely rude trucker – was on I-70 in Kansas. Clyde didn’t want a mishap too close to home, or on a route he most frequented. Cutting back quickly after passing the trucker, a tad sooner than etiquette and protocol allowed, Clyde hit the trigger immediately, having covered the license plate as passing. After a four-second blast with nothing happening – no obvious response from the truck, he triggered the device a second time, his nerves atwitter. Hearing a loud backfire, Clyde throttled down, and made his escape, restoring his plate once too distant to read. The trucker was too busy handling his rig in any event, his power steering out, as well as the trailer air brakes. Success! Clyde was jubilant, determined to go with a full five-second burst the first time on the next one. Discipline to hold the full one one thousand, two one thousand… was not easy. It being already late afternoon, he decided to call it a day. To settle himself in a 1960s vintage motel he found in a sleepy Kansas farm community. A local dive offered a pizza burger through their drive-up window. That with a Coke, a rare treat, Clyde settled back on the uncomfortable plastic chair that the motel offered to watch cable news and enjoy the memories of news-watching on a fairly regular basis with Jane Ann.

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Before his next safari, he rented a Ford Edge similar to the one he and Jane Ann once owned and took a trip to see his kids and grandkids, thinking it might be his last visit with them.