That's not even adding up what they spent for music. Hit or miss, they found most people want to slug you if you play the following record albums:

Color Me Barbra

Stoney End

The Way We Were

Thighs and Whispers

Broken Blossoms

Or Beaches. Really, especially Beaches.

You could put Mahatma Gandhi into a convent, cut off his nuts, shoot him full of Demerol, and he'd still take a shot at your face if you played him that “Wind Beneath Your Wings” song. Least-wise, that was Webber's experience.

None of this is what the military trained them for. But, coming home, you don't find any want ads for munitions experts, targeting specialists, missions point-men. Coming home, they didn't find much of any kind of job. Nothing that paid near what Flint was getting, his legs peeking through the slit down the side of a green satin evening gown, his toes webbed with nylon stockings and poking out the front of gold sandals. Flint stopped just long enough between songs and slugs to put more foundation over his bruises, his cigarette ringed with red from his lips. His lipstick and blood.

County fairs were good business, but motorcycle runs came a close second. Rodeos were good, too. So were boat shows. Or the parking lots outside those big gun-and-knife conventions. No, they never had to look too far for a good-paying crowd.

Driving back to the motel one night, after Webber and Flint had left most of their makeup smeared on the blacktop outside the Western States Guns and Ammo Expo, Webber pulls the rearview mirror around to where he's riding shotgun in the front seat. Webber rolls his face around to see it from the mirror at every angle, and he says, “I can't be up to this much longer.”

Webber, he looks fine. Besides, how he looks don't matter. The song matters more. The wig and lipstick.

“I was never what you'd call pretty,” Webber says, “but least-ways I always kept myself looking . . . nice.”

Flint's driving, looking at the chipped red paint on his fingernails holding the steering wheel. Nibbling down a torn nail with his chipped teeth, Flint says, “I was thinking about using a stage name.” Still looking at his fingernails, he says, “What do you all think of the name Pepper Bacon?”

About by now, Flint's girl, she was off in flight school.

That's just as well. Things was sliding down hill.

For instance, just before they got set up and ready, in the parking lot outside the Mountain States Gem and Mineral Show, Webber looks at Flint and says, “Your goddamn boobs are too big . . .”

Flint's wearing a halter kind of long dress, with straps that tie behind his neck to keep the front up. And, yeah, his boobs look big, but Flint says it's the new dress.

And Webber says, “No, it ain't. Your boobs been growing for the past four states.”

“All your carping,” Flint says, “it's just cuz they're bigger than yours.”

And Webber says, real quiet out the corner of his lipstick mouth, he says, “Former Staff Sergeant Flint Stedman, you're turning into a sloppy goddamn cow . . .”

Then it's sequins and wig hair flying every which way. That night, they raked in a total of zero cash. Nobody wants to slug a mess like that, already all scratched up and bleeding. Eyes all bloodshot and mascara all smeared from crying.

Looking back, that little cat fight damn near scuttled their mission.

The reason this country can't win a war is because we're all the time fighting each other instead of the enemy. Same as in the Congress not letting the military do their job. Nothing ever getting settled that way. Webber and Flint, they ain't bad people, just typical of what we're trying to rise above. Their whole mission is to settle this terrorism situation. Settle it for good. And doing that takes money. To keep Flint's girl in school. To get their hands on a jet. Get the drugs they'll need to knock out the regular lease-company pilot. That all takes solid cash money.

The truth be told, Flint's tits were getting a little on the scary side.

Flying here, reclining on white leather at fifty-one thousand feet, they're headed south along the Red Sea, all the way to Jedda, where they'll hang a left.

The other guys in the air right now, all of them headed for their own assigned targets, you have to wonder how they made their money. What pain and torture they went through.

You can still see where Webber got his ears pierced, and how pulled down and stretched out they still look from those dangle earrings.

Looking back, most of the wars in history were over somebody's religion.

This is just the attack to end all wars. Or at least most of them.

After Flint got control of his tits, they toured from college to college. Anywhere people drank beer with nothing to do. By now, Flint had a detached retina floating around, making him blind in that eye. Webber had a 60-percent hearing loss from his brain getting bounced around. Traumatic brain lesions, the emergency room called it. They were both of them a little shaky, needing both hands to hold a mascara wand steady. Both of them too stiff to work the zipper up the back of his own dress. Wobbly on even their medium heels. Still, they went on.

When it came time, when the jet fighters from the United Arab Emirates would come to shadow them, Flint might be too blind to fly, but he'd be in the cockpit with everything he'd learned in the air force.

Here, in the white leather cabin of their Gulfstream G550, Flint has kicked off both his boots, and his bare feet show toenails still painted titty-pink. You can still smell a hint of Chanel No. 5 perfume mixed with his BO.

One of their last shows, in Missoula, Montana, a girls steps out of the crowd to tell them they're hateful bigots. That they're encouraging violent hate crimes being acted out against the gender-conflicted members of our otherwise peaceful pluralistic society . . .

Webber standing there, cut off in the middle of singing “Buttons and Bows,” the spiffy Doris Day version, not the cheesy Dinah Shore version, he's wearing a strapless blue satin sheath with all his chest hair, his shoulder and arm hair billowing from wrist to wrist like a lush boa of black feathers, and he asks this girl, “So you wanna buy a punch or not?”

Flint's one step away, at the head of the line, taking people's money, and he says, “Take your best shot.” He says, “Half price for chicks.”

And the girl, she just looks at them, tapping one of her feet in its tennis shoe, her mouth clamped shut and pulled way over to one side of her face.

Finally, she says, “Can you fake-sing that Titanic song?”

And Flint takes her ten bucks and gives her a hug. “For you,” he says, “we can play that song all night long . . .”

That was the night they finally topped out the fifty grand for the mission.

Now, outside the jet, you can see the torn brown-and-gold coastline of Saudi Arabia. The windows of a Gulfstream are two, three times the size of the little porthole you get on a commercial jetliner. Just looking out, at the sun and ocean, everything else mixed together from this high up, you'd almost want to live. To scrub the whole mission and head home, no matter how bleak the future.

A Gulfstream carries enough fuel to fly 6,750 nautical miles, even with an 85-percent headwind. Their target was only going to take 6,701, leaving just enough jet fuel to trigger their luggage, their suitcases plus the bags and bags that Jenson loaded in Florida, where they landed because the pilot started to feel sick. This is after they got him a cup of coffee. Three Vicodins ground and mixed in black coffee would make most people dizzy, groggy, sick. So they landed. Offloaded the regular pilot. Onloaded the bags. Mr. Jenson humping the ammonium nitrate. And here was Flint's girl, Sheila, fresh out of flight school and ready to take off.