ner, hit a hundred miles an hour,
then take it right into "the skid-pan," a section of greased track
where two tons of Detroit iron can whip and spin like a hockey puck.

Cars don't fare well at FLETC. First they're rifled again and again
for search practice. Then they do 25,000 miles of high-speed pursuit
training; they get about seventy miles per set of steel-belted radials.
Then it's off to the skid pan, where sometimes they roll and tumble
headlong in the grease. When they're sufficiently grease-stained,
dented, and creaky, they're sent to the roadblock unit, where they're
battered without pity. And finally then they're sacrificed to the
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whose trainees learn the ins
and outs of car-bomb work by blowing them into smoking wreckage.

There's a railroad box-car on the FLETC grounds, and a large grounded
boat, and a propless plane; all training-grounds for searches. The
plane sits forlornly on a patch of weedy tarmac next to an eerie
blockhouse known as the "ninja compound," where anti-terrorism
specialists practice hostage rescues. As I gaze on this creepy paragon
of modern low-intensity warfare, my nerves are jangled by a sudden
staccato outburst of automatic weapons fire, somewhere in the woods to
my right. "Nine-millimeter," Fitzpatrick judges calmly.

Even the eldritch ninja compound pales somewhat compared to the truly
surreal area known as "the raid-houses." This is a street lined on both
sides with nondescript concrete-block houses with flat pebbled roofs.
They were once officers' quarters. Now they are training grounds. The
first one to our left, Fitzpatrick tells me, has been specially adapted
for computer search-and-seizure practice. Inside it has been wired for
video from top to bottom, with eighteen pan-and-tilt remotely
controlled videocams mounted on walls and in corners. Every movement
of the trainee agent is recorded live by teachers, for later taped
analysis. Wasted movements, hesitations, possibly lethal tactical
mistakes--all are gone over in detail.

Perhaps the weirdest single aspect of this building is its front door,
scarred and scuffed all along the bottom, from the repeated impact, day
after day, of federal shoe-leather.

Down at the far end of the row of raid-houses some people are
practicing a murder. We drive by slowly as some very young and rather
nervous-looking federal trainees interview a heavyset bald man on the
raid-house lawn.