It was not a dark and stormy night.
It was a bright, sunny, cloudless morning in late March. I was airborne, of course, flying a Stearman biplane level at exactly 501 feet above the Atlantic surf along Daytona Beach. Tens of thousands of college students on spring break were sprawled all over the warm sand, the crowd stretching from Miami to St. Augustine. It was the perfect spot we'd been looking for.
Ostensibly, I was towing a banner advertising Ron Jon's surf shop, flying back and forth, up and down the coast. I'd been assigned the region from New Smyrna Beach northward to Flagler Beach. Surreptitously, I was on yet another top secret assignment for the Agency, running a trial of a new chemtrail mix. The crowd of nearly naked young sun worshipers was exactly the test group we needed.
The test mix was a radical new sunscreen and only a secret dosing of a large mass of subjects could prove its efficacy. The new blend was promised to protect the subjects from dying of melanoma thirty years hence. Of course, there were those in the Agency who argued that it did this by killing them with brain tumors in only twenty years, but we don't need to debate the science right now. After all, the sunscreen had been tested extensively on bats and had gained the approval of the renowned Wutan dermatology expert Dr. Phau Chee. Never mind that the Center for Dermatitis Control was arguing that the chemical was only effective if the user also covered his skin with three layers of wool clothing.
I was trying to be as alert as possible, given the distractions of bikini-clad femmes just below. Shortly before takeoff, I had received a classified text message alerting me to the potential for trouble. It seemed that word of our top secret program had been leaked to the American Academy of Dermatology. The dermatologists realized how our little scheme might impact their revenue stream and they were most decidedly unhappy about the matter.
I pondered how the information leak might have occurred. I supposed it was possible, though doubtful, that it had come from the beautiful Russian dermatologist who kept buying me drinks at the Boot Hill Saloon last night. Since I couldn't recall anything I said after the third boilermaker, I didn't really have any evidence she was the one so I dismissed that idea. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed to be Ted, my chief who oversaw the mixing and loading of my tanks. Ted's father was a dermatology tycoon who owned a nationwide chain of drive-thru skin care clinics and stood to lose a fortune if the spraying worked.
No matter the source of the leak, I knew there were risks this morning. Nevertheless, I wasn't really expecting heavy flak and ground fire. As I began my turn at Flagler to begin another southern pass, what I had mistaken for a simple fishing boat proved to be something else entirely. From the hold sprang a veritable army of enraged dermatologists wearing their white lab coats and carrying AR15s. Suddenly I was in a swarm of tracer bullets.
A Stearman loaded down with sunscreen and towing an advertising banner isn't the most maneuverable bird in the sky, so my options for evasive action were limited. Due to the weight of the chem trail tanks, the plane wasn't carrying any serious armament that morning but it still seemed that a counter attack was my best option. I pulled my KelTec P-32 (manufactured at their nearby Cocoa Beach plant, by the way) from my pocket, stuck my arm out, and began my strafing run on the boat.
I suppose those derms had never been in a firefight before as my little peashooter sent them diving for cover or diving overboard. The attack was over, but the damage to my lovely Stearman had been done. She was losing power and if were to limp back to the space shuttle runway, which the Agency had secured for this mission, I would have to reduce my load somehow. It flashed through my mind to drop the Ron Jon's banner, but that would mean giving up the advertising revenue and so was unthinkable. The only thing to do was to use the dump valve on the chem trail tanks, so hundreds of gallons of experimental sunscreen went straight into the Atlantic.
And that's why, if you dine on fresh Florida seafood this summer, you will notice that none of the grouper or snapper are sunburned.
