Closer To God
VI
Iron Snake
I grabbed the extended hand, going into a double wrist-lock for additional support. Burt’s arm retracted like a hydraulic ram coming up out of a ditch, and I was pulled straight to the top step of the car. I stuck my head out into the increasing wind as the train accelerated out of the sharp curve. I was the last aboard. A well-groomed conductor retracted the stairs, and then stood looking at us as if viewing zoo specimens. We were at the end of the last car. He blocked the aisle without seeming to do so. I produced our tickets, which he examined, clipped twice and pointed forward with, before returning them to my hand.
We’d waited an hour for the train under Ficus trees, called Mugumo locally, that lined the tracks, with an assortment of natives impatient to clamber aboard with us. Apparently, once aboard, the conductors charged a lower, negotiated price, than could be had at the ticket station.
Our First Class sleeping car was located just beyond the dining car. Most of the overnight train configuration was spent on Fourth Class Fare, which meant four bunks to a room. Burt and I had only two, the extra space taken up by a bench seat with a long private window.
We made our way down the aisle, situated along the left windowed wall of the car. The only cars with center aisles were the dining and day-seat cars. The creak of wood and clicking of wheels were comforting sounds of security. The room was a welcome haven from events of the day. At least it was until I looked at the door. I moved past it, raising one hand to stop Burt. We stood on each side of the door looking at the holes around the handle. Small bore bullet holes. The kind slow, sub-sonic silenced rounds make when they enter wood.
I looked at Burt. Neither of us brought out any weaponry, although there was nobody in the corridor with us. There would be no one inside the room, which I confirmed by pushing the now unlockable door open with my foot. It swung wide, allowing us to see every inch of the space. No one waited because they would have been waiting inside an inescapable trap, in the event of problems. We were up against pros, who wouldn’t expose themselves to the whimsy of chance unless they had to.
I went around the inside of the room, poking my finger into holes on the far side wall and then the frames of our bunk beds.
“Why’d they shoot out the lock? The doors don’t have keys. You can only lock them from the inside.” Burt asked, pulling the bottom bunk down from the wall with a thud, and then sitting atop the mattress.
“Not anymore,” I answered. “Kind of gives me the idea that we’re gonna have visitors later, and they don’t even care if we know ahead of time.”
“Cheeky bastards,” Burt sighed. “Why they treating us like citizens?”
Citizens are regular people. People who have no knowledge of intelligence work, guns, pyrotechnics, or real violence. We call ourselves, and others like us, players. Once you are a player you can never be a real citizen again. Most of us think we can, but in truth, it just can’t be done. “Paranoia bites deep….” the song goes.
“Maybe that’s all the intel they have. Maybe we’re just a hit to them. Maybe they don’t have a formal organization behind them,” I mused, taking a place on the bench seat. The scenery going by was the outskirts of Southern Nairobi. Broken blocks, tile and brick, mixed in with metal sheets in a state of angled falling rust everywhere. And dust. Tons of gray dust runneled through with dark rivulets of muddy water. And native peoples everywhere. Three stone fires sending up hundreds of single plum smoke signals wherever I looked.
Our door flew open. My left hand slipped straight into left front pocket, the forty-five bearing on the door open through the cloth of my trousers. A woman stood in the door.
“Evening mates,” she said, loudly and cheerfully, her rough but attractive face broken nearly in half by a huge smile.
“Hi,” Burt mumbled.
My hand relaxed out of my pocket. I was staring at an ‘Earth Mother,’ as we term them. Young women, mostly from England or Australia, some from America, who come over to Africa and then wander about the countries in their comfortable boots. They invariably wear shorts, long sleeve shirts and carry packs that have to weigh more than seventy pounds. Their lack of fear and sense of adventure has always impressed us.
“We got wine if you got an opener,” she stated, with a great laugh.
I was taken aback for a few seconds. An Earth Mother without a Swiss Army knife? I couldn’t picture it. Then I realized we were being invited over for social reasons. The bottle-opener was cover.
“Sure,” I responded, assuming that Burt had more tools behind the padding of his multi-purpose coat.
“Americans?” the woman asked.
We didn’t answer.
“I know from the accent,” she went on, turning to lead us to her room, as both of us had risen to our feet. “’Hi,’ like ‘Hey’ is strictly American. Then there’s the ‘sure’ comment. Another dead giveaway.”
She was Australian, I knew, from her own heavy accent, but I didn’t reply, only following her two berths down the aisle, where another door was open.
“Ever go see the Flamingos,” she inquired, but not waiting for an answer. “At that lake outside of town American tourists like to go to? Down there they always say the same thing when they see the birds: ‘Oh my God, they’re so pink.” She laughed heartily. I had to laugh too. Her impersonation of an American, totally over done, had been vividly descriptive and funny.
We filed into the room. The woman closed the door behind us, engaging the lock with a loud click. There were three other women in the room, all heavily tanned, all smiling broadly. I was humorously glad that I was armed. Burt produced his own Swiss knife, bottle-opener extended. He went to work on a bottle.
“Four of you in a two-bed First Class room?” I inquired.
“Sleeping bags,” the woman named Wendy, who’d invited us in, answered. “First Class room is two hundred shillings less than a four bed Fourth Class.” I marveled, as that amount of local currency was worth about three bucks, and then took a seat on the floor, my back to the outer wall so I could face the locked door. We’d already had a lesson in just how secure those were.
We drank two bottles of red wine. The label read ‘Terpenja Garnacha,” which I knew was Spanish, and surprisingly, not that cheap. Burt and I nursed ours in paper cups, knowing that there were other players aboard who’d have to be dealt with at some point in the night.
“They call this train the Lunatic Express, you know,” Wendy commented, her voice beginning to slur. “There was a lot of opposition to its being built by the British in the eighteen hundreds,” she slurred on.
“Iron snake,” Burt stated, speaking for the first times since we’d entered the cabin. We all looked at him. “Its what the natives call the train,” he followed, his expression showing surprise at our rapt attention. “Kikuyu. The natives are mostly Kikuyu, not Masai,” he finished, almost guiltily, eyeing the remaining wine in his cup.
I couldn’t believe that I had heard correctly. My formal education was in ethnology. Cultural Anthropology they used to call it, before they wanted everyone to think it was all about the study of fish or bugs. I understood the origins and interaction of the cultures in Kenya. I simply could not believe that a Knuckle-dragger, especially a huge dumb-looking one like Burt, would know anything about such things.
“Where the hell did you go to school?” I asked him, without thinking.
“Thornton Fractional,” he replied, proudly. I knew it to be a high school located somewhere in South Chicago. I didn’t know why I expected some center of higher education to come out of his mouth, but I had.
“You two don’t even know each other? Wendy inquired. “We thought you were companions.” The women all laughed, while Burt’s face grew red.
“I’m not gay,” he said, his voice small amid the raucous sounds filling the room around us.
“So, are you married?” Wendy asked me, directly, her first two words coming out as one.
I said I was.
“All the good ones…and all that,” she replied, then went on, “What’s her name?”
“Joan,” I answered, not having a clue as to why I lied, or used that name.
Burt almost laughed out load, held back only by the angry frown I sent across the room at him.
“Gotta use the loo,” Wendy said, unlocking the door. The other women paid full attention to Burt while she was gone, he having indicated that he was single. I presumed that they were merely practicing their skills, as Burt and I were a good fifteen years older than any of them.
Wendy re-entered the room. “Some Bogans down at your place,” she stated, offhandedly, before being surprised by Burt’s instant rise from the floor.
“What’s a Bogan?” he asked, opening the door a fraction, then drawing out his suppressed automatic. I joined him, the AMT Hardballer in my left hand, pointed down. The room went silent and still, the sounds of the train seeming to grow louder with each passing second.
“What have we got?” I whispered.
Burt held up one finger, then pointed aft, toward the dining car. His finger then tapped his own forehead.
“Okay, out you go. I’ll give you ten minutes.” I checked my wrist, but there was no Omega there. I cursed.
His gun disappeared. He was out the door and gone, seemingly more smoothly and quickly than a man his size could move. I slid the forty-five back into my pocket, then turned to face the women. They sat frozen, one with a cup of wine halfway to her lips. I slid down the door, sitting with my back to it.
“I wont stay long, just until Burt gets back. You’ll never see us again, once we hit Mombasa,” I said, my voice soft but flat.
“Mombasa,” Wendy replied, her voice no longer slurring. “It means ‘Battle City’ in Nandi,” she said, matter-of-factly. I didn’t reply, instead waiting for the inevitable question. It came, but not in the form I expected.
“Who are the others?” Wendy inquired.
“We don’t know,” I answered, truthfully. “They came at us in Nairobi because of something that happened in Mombasa. So we’re going there to find out. They don’t have good intentions.”
“That wasn’t a normal kind of gun, the one your friend has,” Wendy stated.
“We’ve seen a lot of guns on our Walkabout. That one’s not normal,” she repeated.
I had nothing to say. I didn’t care about lying to the Aussies, but I could see no reason to add anything I didn’t have to, other than about Joan being my wife, and I couldn’t understand what had made me say that in the first place.
“He’s the killer, so what does that make you?” Wendy asked, the other women opening a third bottle of the wine, as if they commonly spent time in enclosed spaces with gun-toting hitmen.
I again did not answer, setting my cup aside.
“You’ve drunk our wine. We’ve taken you in. You owe us something,” she said, slowly, with quiet expressive meaning.
I looked at all four of them, trying to decide what to say. If there was a code for such encounters, then Wendy was right. Our taking up with them had, at the least, saved a potentially violent confrontation, which might not have worked to our advantage. And she had warned us. I took out the wad of local currency and peeled off two bills.
“Two thousand shillings,” I intoned, putting the money in front of Wendy’s feet, since she made no move to accept it with her hand.
“More,” she said, with no smile on her face or in her voice.
I took another bill from the roll, but she held out her hand.
“Enough money. Tell us more.” She pulled her hand back, then filled her cup to the brim with red wine.
I sighed and put the roll back in my pocket. “We’re agents. It doesn’t matter what kind of agents. One of us got killed in Mombasa. Burt and I came to redress that loss, but nothing when right. When I inquired, these guys, who we don’t know, came at us. Shooting. We can’t go back and we can’t go forward until we know more, which is why were going down to where we lost that agent.” I finished, hoping that my explanation would be enough.
“Can’t exactly go back to your berth, now can you?” one of the other women said.
I had no answer. The woman was correct in her assumption. Unless I could be certain that none of our pursuers were on the train, it would be very risky to stay in the berth we’d booked. But it wouldn’t be any safer elsewhere on the train, unless it was in a berth nobody knew about. Like the one I was in.
“Since Burt isn’t married, he can stay with me, if he doesn’t mind the hard floor,” the woman went on.
“What’s your name,” I asked her.
“Ruthie,” she answered. “Ruthie Jorgensen,” she fluffed her bright blond hair, as if to indicate the obviousness of her Scandinavian heritage, then went on, “but they call me Dingo, because I don’t talk much.”
“Well, that’s more than kind of you Dingo, but Burt’s much older than you. Women don’t take to men like us, and they usually have better judgment than to marry us,” I warned her.
“Except for Joan, that is,” Wendy said, drinking her whole cup of wine down, before going for another.
“I’m not married, since we’re trying to talk truth here. I lied, to fit in better."
"Joan," I said, and then I paused. I could not minimize Joan, “Joan’s a real woman, but with somebody else. And yes, you’ve shared your wine, your room and your friendship with us. That deserves something, which is what I’m trying to give you. Our problems are not your problems, and our problems are very serious.”
“Than you can sleep in my bunk,” Wendy said. “I mean, since your not really married.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Far from rejecting us, the women were welcoming us into their lives, at least while we were all aboard the train.
“Listen to me. We lie for a living. Violence is our stock and trade. We’re not good men. We’re just tools, guided around out here by people who don’t necessarily have the best interests of humanity at heart.”
“Is that part the lying?” Dingo asked, her face serious. I massaged my face with both hands. I had never encountered Earth Mothers, except in passing, and I was finding the experience frustrating and difficult to deal with. I also noted, when I was done talking, that the two thousand shilling notes were no longer on the floor. Wendy smiled, as if in thanks. I wondered, by the time the train hit Mombasa, whether Burt or I would have any currency left between us.
There was a very soft single knock on the door. I felt it rather than heard it.
The bad guys would not be knocking, and there was also no way they could know which cabin we were in. I stood and opened the door. Burt slipped in, and then took his place near Dingo where he’d originally sat.
“What’d you find?” I asked him.
Burt looked at me, then at the women, then back at me, without speaking.
“They’re in,” I told him. “We’re staying with them. Don’t ask how or why. Talk to me.”
With an expression of reservation written across his face, Burt talked. “They had a Fourth Class room let. There were three of them, all Caucasian. They decided that it was in their best interest,” Burt stopped, looking around the silent room carefully, “to leave the train before we got to Mombasa.”
“This is a non-stop,” Wendy stated, analytically.
“Any blood? Clean-up? Disturbance?” I asked, ignoring her.
“No. They were in the last car. I popped the emergency latches on their window, and out they went. Had some duct tape, so the window won’t flap, or anything like that.”
“You made them jump from the train?” Wendy asked, obviously stunned. “But the train is going a hundred kilometers an hour.”
“Would have been nice to talk to them. You didn’t question them, did you?” I interrupted.
Burt looked at me, his expression showing guilt.
“No, but I did get these,” he said, laying two RAP automatics on the seat between he and Dingo. She immediately caressed the surface of both pieces.
“Parabellum?” I inquired of him. He said nothing, confirming my analysis. The guns were nine millimeter’s produced by a small company in South Africa. That company supplied the local police forces. The weapons were not normally available on the private market outside of that country.
“Boers. Shit. What the hell do the Boers have to do with this?” I said the words to myself, thinking. “You find the suppressor?”
A gray, powder-coated cylinder joined the two automatics. I stared at it for a moment. “SAI,” I asked. Again, Burt did not answer. “Shit,” I said. At every turn with these unknown assailants we were being confronted with an abundance of capability and quality material. SAI was a company out of Denmark. They produced a ‘carbon’ silencer superior even to an oil-filled device, but they were usually more expensive than the weapon they were fitted to.
“Get rid of them,” I said, concluding there was nothing more to be learned from the weapons.
“Can I have one?” Dingo asked.
“Me too,” Wendy followed, instantly.
“Alright, take them, but not the suppressor. That goes out the window.” I was unable to keep the exasperated tone from my voice. I was traveling from Nairobi to Mombasa in the middle of the night aboard the infamous Iron Snake, trapped in a room with people equally as crazy as I, if not more so. The thought did not give me comfort.
“Way cool,” the supposedly silent Dingo intoned, using her caricature of an American accent. “What about dinner. You can’t go to the dining car can you, I mean with those others having gotten off the train early?” She stroked here new acquisition while she talked. Burt smiled at her, and then produced a magazine filled with cartridges. I looked from one of them to the other, wondering which one of them was in more trouble.
I took out my wad of shillings. “These seem to work wonders here. I think we can manage dinner in the cabin.”
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V
Have Gun Will Travel
The Yaya shopping complex came up quickly as Sam curved in off Argwings. The place was covered with local woods, all blonde, accented with near iridescent
blue lettering in bad English; “y go anywhere else” right up over the entrance. It was off hours at the Java House so we got a table. Two, after I pointed across the place when Burt and Sam walked up. I stopped Burt to halve the wad of shillings I carried, happy to get rid of the stuff.
“Two Kenyan double ‘A’ class ones,” I said to his departing back. I wondered if he’d heard me, but then, the man had proven to be anything but a conversationalist. I took the available corner seat, so I could cover the front. I knew Burt would cover everything else. I wondered if the kid had a gun, but dismissed the thought almost as quickly as I had it. Stevens wouldn’t send one of his men into the field unarmed.
“You wanted coffee?” I inquired of Joan, attempting to gauge her mood.
“Ah, doesn’t look like what I want is at issue,” she said back, stiffly.
“I apologize, “ I said, with a sigh. It had been a long day, and the evening ahead didn’t look much better. Burt and I had to get on the train while avoiding
surveillance, which would certainly be on hand. Quite possibly it would be safer to take the car, now that drone strikes guided in from some secret Texas location were not in the cards. But I needed a night’s sleep, and so did Burt. The kid could handle the all night drive.
“Doesn’t matter, really, but its why I generally find people like you pretty disgusting. Women are not some service instruments to be led and controlled by ‘Promise Keeper’ males.”
I had heard those words before, from the Reborn Christian movement, wherein men sought to gain control over their family life, which really meant their wives. I thought it a bit more complex than she was portraying it but I let it go. I knew I had a habit of calling women ‘girls,’ and telling them what to do. I didn’t like it in myself, and I was working on it. But I was stung by her words, nevertheless.
“You know people like me? I thought I was in pretty rare territory, being what I am with the Agency and all, not to mention the military, the combat, the travel and tragedy. “ I stopped myself. I was there to get information, not attempt to win an argument that was unwinnable. That I liked her had no bearing, and it was not going to make her any more predisposed to like me.
We looked at one another across the table. I noted that her mouth naturally curved up, like it did a lot of smiling, even when she was not, like right then. She was just South of forty, I guessed, and with her looks, had had a tough time passing that milepost. Divorced less than two years ago. I wondered whether age had had anything to do with it. But I didn’t have any experience in marriage. Divorce was all around me. I tended to ignore it. There was nothing more boring than listening to someone detail just how rotten and evil their former partner-for-life was. I had always wanted to blurt out ‘so you’re saying that you are terribly shitty at selection?’ but I never had. I had maybe three friends on the planet, if I counted Burt, and I was topping the forty mark too.
“Do you like Africa?” she asked, speaking just as Burt showed up with two coffees, served in beautiful ceramic mugs, with containers of cream and old-fashioned cubes of sugar on the side.
I inhaled deeply, and then looked around, as I put a dollop of cream into my cup. “The place stinks. Nobody uses deodorant, except for the Wazungu, like us.”
I hated the Swahili term for white person. It reminded me of my childhood, when I had had to endure the term ‘Haole’ every day at school. The ‘H’ word we later called it. In Kenya, it was the ‘W’ word. “And there are parasites everywhere, once you get out of town. The dust is awful, almost all the time. The heat is oppressive, and the rain is seldom cooling or satisfactory at all.” I quit talking for a moment, to stir in my cream and sugar.
“I love it,” I finally concluded. “I don’t know why.”
Joan smiled, and then laughed for the first time, flipping her lovely hair when she did. It bounced several times. “There’s a phrase here that I don’t think you’ve heard. One that explains just what you just said.”
My eyebrows shot up. I thought I’d been pretty damned original, and I also knew I’d been around the Dark Continent for a bit.
“Africa is closer to God. That’s why you love it. That’s why I love it. Its impossible to explain to people who don’t live here.”
“Africa is closer to God,” I repeated, liking the words as they came out, but not really understanding how they applied.
“Who got shot?” she asked, catching me off guard. Her light inflection of the words told me that she didn’t really believe it had happened.
“You were shot at, in the car, as we left the Safari Park,” I reminded her, for credibility’s sake.
“What are you talking about?” she asked, again surprising me.
“The glass blowing out of the windows. I don’t think you missed that part, as you screamed loud enough to deafen Burt and I. The glass reacted to a bullet, fired from behind us by a silenced weapon.” I watched her slowly lower her coffee to the table, her complexion going like the song, a whiter shade of pale.
“I thought you broke the glass out for some reason,” she said, her voice shaking, her ceramic cup doing the same thing. I moved my head back and forth slowly.
“Something happened here. I don’t know what. But its important enough for people to have hired professionals to go after me. And now Burt. And they don’t seem to care that they might kill the DCM of a major United States Embassy as collateral damage. I need to know what you know. All of it, and I need it now.”
“You said that Rajic tried to get my husband killed.”
“You ex-husband,” I reminded her, looking at the wedding ring still on the appropriate finger of her left hand.
“That’s none of your business,” she fired back, covering her left hand with her right. “He tried to kill Paul, our Ambassador. What craziness is that? You’re just agents, you and that gorilla, but he’s an Ambassador.”
“You’re Ambassador?” I quipped, not being able to stop myself.
Joan’s color went from pale to red in an instant.
“Who do you think you are? Who do you think you’re talking to. No little puissant like you is going to insult me.” She started to rise to her feet.
“Please,” I begged, touching her left arm. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me. My life is at stake here. I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into. But I know that I’ve now dragged Burt and Sam into it, as well. And you. I’m a good agent, but I’m used to working with a script. I’ve got no help at all. Help me.”
She sank back onto the solid mahogany chair. The hushed sound of her clothing adjusting to new positions denoted the expensive nature of their fabric.
The woman was one class act and I was being forced to treat her that way.
“Call the goddamned CIA. Don’t you have some ‘Control Central’ or something?” She sipped her coffee after speaking, which, for some reason, I took to be a good sign.
“Control Officer. His name’s Lee, “ I blurted out, for no good reason at all. Just another of many violations of protocol and procedure I was wracking up since flying into Jomo Kenyatta Airport only the day before. “I can’t call. What am I going to say? That I violated orders in speaking to Rajic? That I’m responsible for an attempt on Paul’s life? That I’m trying to find out what really happened to Smith, who was a friend of mine? That I’m not going to let these new clowns shoot at me without killing them?”
Joan shook her head, frowning deeply. I noted that she didn’t use Botox. I liked that. Except for the fact that she held my very existence in contempt, I liked everything about her.
“I can’t reach Lee. Not yet. He’d have to recall me instantly. I won’t be listed as having gone rogue, but they won’t provide me any support until things get a bit more sorted out. They’ll be mad as hell that I’m not filling them in on anything. They lust for data. Any data. All data.”
“Oh,” was her only response, her eyes refusing to meet mine.
“Tell me about Rajic. I was informed that he had a jewelry business by the Airport here. Hell, I dumped him not far from there this morning.”
“He does, or rather his cousin or uncle does. I don’t really know. His main business, and his place of residence, is a ferry down in Mombasa, and he goes by Raj, not Rajic.”
“Raj owns the private ferry running out of Likoni?” I asked. There were three ferries joining the island of Mombasa to the mainland at the South end. Only one was private. It was a ramshackle ferry. I knew because I’d ridden it. Old, steam powered, rusting away, but filled with people bustling and laughing for every cruise. Mombasa had been trying to get rid of it for years but it was grand-father’d in.
Mombasa had a population of nearly a million, as much as that of San Francisco, but piled onto an island one fourth the size of Manhatten. All three ferries were jammed during daylight hours.
“And you know him how?” I continued.
“He’s come by at least once a week, to the Embassy, for over a year, although he’s been known to disappear for months at a time.”
“You know him? Talk to him? What?” I asked, in some frustration at the woman’s reticence to give any detail.
“I’m Deputy Chief of Mission, for Christ’s sake. I know just about everything that goes on there. Keep your shirt on.” She scowled, taking in more Kenya double A, some of the finest coffee on earth as long as you got the biggest ‘class one’ beans.
“Doesn’t seem like you know much about what Paul has been up to? People are trying to kill him, me, possibly even you. So give me what you have.”
Joan colored, her cheeks going to what I knew had to be some shade of red. I liked it, even if I couldn’t really identify the color.
“He’s a little scum-bag of human detritus, who’s never spoken to me. He’s only capable of leering at women. One of those.”
“Maybe he found you attractive,” I offered, instantly wishing I hadn’t.
“What are you? One of those men who a woman can’t even wear a skirt around? One of those animals who find women to be merely receptacles for their inadequate deposit?”
A silence descended over the table. I drank the cooling coffee, admiring my thick ceramic mug, the letters ‘J.H.’ glazed to its surface. I’d of considered stealing it if it the letters were ‘J.D.’
“You’re right,” she relented, after a few minutes. “I don’t know anything about any of this. I’ve never had anything violent happen during my service. I’m going to talk to Paul. He’s not a bad man, but he’s a fool.” She once again touched her wedding ring.
“Haggerty. You going to keep the name?” I risked, waiting for her to strike.
“Kilkenny. I’m taking back my maiden name when I get to the States. I never liked the ‘hag’ connotation of his name. I suppressed a laugh, covering my mouth with one hand, as if to wipe away a speck of foam. The ‘kill’ part of her maiden name had blown right by her. I was relieved my name wasn’t Kenny.
“What if they’re on the train?” She asked, after a moment.
“They probably will be,” I answered. “They’ll have the airport staked out, the rental car agencies, the major roads and yes, the train. They think we have to get out of the country any way we can, and we don’t have Agency help. So, some will probably be on the train.”
“Why don’t you just come to the Embassy and stay there. Nobody can get you there. When this all blows over you can leave.”
I laughed. “Now, who’s the Ambassador again? And how did we come to be targets in the first place? Paul had something to do with that. Stevens is cool, maybe Tyrell is okay, but I don’t know that, and I’m going to find out what happened to Smith.”
“You’re not a believable man,” she answered, forcefully. “I don’t think for a minute that Paul would have anything to do with violence. Certainly not terminal violence, and now I’m starting to sound like you.”
“That would be me,” I raised my cup to her, “the man who disgusts you.”
“I didn’t say that,” she retorted. “I said that men like you disgust me. That’s different.”
I couldn’t see the difference, in listening to her, but also knew that she had no helpful information to give me. I got up.
“What’s your plan?” She asked.
I ignored her. Burt and Sam were deep in discussion across the room, which was beginning to fill up with late afternoon patrons. Work ended early in Nairobi, or not at all, down in the sweatshops South of city central. I walked away, to have a moment with them.
I joined both men, taking a chair with my back to Joan. “She’s quite an amazing woman,” I said, for no good reason at all.
“Yeah,” Burt replied, “She’s a real sweetheart.”
Sam said nothing.
“Take her back to the Embassy, no matter where she wants to go. This thing that’s going on is hot. She’d make great hostage material, and I also get the idea that not everyone knows she and her ex-husband are not close anymore.”
“Yes, sir,” the young Marine responded. “When I make the run down Mombasa road, do I take out any opposition, or what?”
I liked the kid’s attitude. He had to be all of twenty, and he was ready to take on the world, even when he didn’t have a clue as to what was going on or whom we were opposing. But then, he knew about as much as we did.
“You packing?” I asked him, as quietly as I could.
“Duty nine. Sixteen in the back, with a Remington twelve.”
My eyebrows went up. Stevens was not messing around. Nine millimeter hand gun, M-16 automatic, and a twelve gauge shot gun. God, I loved Marines. There was nothing to be said. The kid would have to make decisions on his own. It was his life on that dark hard road, not ours.
“How you gonna get on the train?” he inquired, changing the subject.
Sam Hill did not need any more data so I didn’t answer his adolescent question. I rose from the table. “Hit it. Zero seven hundred tomorrow, or so, expect our call, or come looking.” I went back to Joan.
“Sam’s gonna take you wherever you want to go,” I lied. “I’ll call you sometime, maybe when this is over.
She stood, brushing non-existent lint from her beautiful clothing. The bottom was a skirt, and it allowed for her shapely legs to be seen. I looked away before she could notice me taking any interest. I’d had enough pain, not that she was done giving it out.
“Casablanca. This is the scene at the airplane, right?” She smirked.
I took the hit with barely a grimace. We did not say goodbye. Joan and Sam simply left. I turned away in case she looked back. I didn’t want her to see me watching her leave.
“What now, Old Hoss,” Burt intoned, when we got back to the table, making me feel like Michael Landon on Bonanza.
“Is that my name on your cell phone?” I asked back, still irritated with the woman. The Casablanca shot had hit home. She viewed me as some kind of phony macho cowboy, like Tyrell, only worse.
Burt pulled his phone out, flipped up the cover, punched some buttons, and then turned the lit screen to me. It read; “Paladin,” in small black letters, before the number to my phone.
My eyebrows went up. “Have gun will travel? From the old western television series?” I asked.
“A knight without armor in a savage land,” he responded, with a deadpan expression.
I still didn’t know what to make of the big man. Knuckle-draggers were named for the walking appearance of upright Great Apes. When they moved, their knuckles dragged on the ground. Burt was an enigma, and the mystery of his behavior bothered me, not that I could do much about it.
“You figured out the train?” he asked.
“Bus. We’re gonna take a bus to Murthurwa terminal. The tracks take a ninety-degree turn down the road from there. Train slows to five miles per hour, or so. We jump on and we’re gone. Lots of people get on and off at that corner, but I’m willing to bet our ‘friends’ don’t know that.
“You called in?” I asked him, as nonchalantly as I could.
“I’m big, not stupid,” he answered immediately, sipping from a second coffee he had on the table. I was sorry I’d asked. Right then I didn’t think the Agency wanted to hear from us anymore than we wanted to talk to them.
“What were your orders?” I inquired, getting to the heart of the matter, with respect to his place on the mission.
“If you went the wrong way, I was to take control of you, then take out the target.” He drank deeply of the hot Kenya double A.
“Take control of me? Is that Executive Action or just another name for it?” I asked, using the term we used internally for assassination.
“What do you think?” he asked back, not really putting it out there as a question. Nobody at Langley wanted any part of hitting an active agent. The phrase ‘take control,’ was perfect for purposes of plausible deniability outside, but its meaning to all of us inside was clear.
I patted my left front pocket. “This AMT only holds five rounds. I used one. Got anymore?”
Burt fumbled into one of his inside coat pockets, and then came out with another magazine. Surreptitiously, he passed it to me. I checked the first round, sticking up out the top of the small thick metal device. It was pointed, but solid.
“No shot-shell for the first round?” I inquired with a wiry smile.
“If you need a second magazine, then you’re shooting at the right guys,” he answered, adding, “his fast gun for hire heeds the calling wind.”
Neither of us smiled or laughed as I tucked the loaded magazine into my back pocket. Burt was either the best man I have ever worked with, or quite possibly the worst. I could not know which, sitting in the Java House, lost in a truly strange, and now savage, land.
IV
“We’re Going To Mombasa”
We didn’t make it to the Railway Station, instead stopping the small van down around City Central near Kenyatta Avenue. The driver, conductor and two other teen passengers had remained silent during our trip, not that it would have made much difference with rock blasting from all the speakers. The conductor had rotated once to look at us, with attitude, but something about us had kept him from commenting, or doing anything else.
Burt and I were broke. We had to have cash, which meant we needed an ATM. A few businesses would take credit cards, but not many, even in a large developed city like Nairobi. Africa was third world, outside of a very few places. Our Teeny Matata plunged back into the ‘fishball’ of traffic as soon as we were out. I watched my Omega disappear with a glum expression.
“Got a cell phone?” I inquired of Burt, hoping that I had not been wrong about his over-supplied pack rat nature. I was not disappointed. He handed a small phone over to me.
“Will it work here?” I said, opening the Star Trek flip cover. I wasn’t sure why I’d asked the question, as I already knew the answer. Burt didn’t bother to reply.
I examined the phone. It gave the time of day in big numbers on the screen. I knew that young people did not even wear watches anymore. They got their time from cell phones. I wasn’t that young.
“Agency?” I went on.
“Safaricom chip,” Burt said back. That meant the phone was on a local system instead of any international. It was a relatively untraceable way to communicate, but I wasn’t thinking of calling anyone until we knew more of what we were involved with. Phone calls would give more information out than I was comfortable with. I wondered what other toys Burt had. The mission had been cadged together at the last minute. There had been no clearance meetings, or even initial planning sessions. Things like ingress, egress, communications, armament,
and even financing, had been thrust upon us instead of being homogeneously put together with forethought and design. I put the phone in my pocket. Now I had a bulge on each side, but high fashion was not something common to Eastern Africa.
“Braclays is over in Queensway House on Kuanda,” I pointed out.
I walked in that direction, looking around to see if any of our pursuers had picked us up. If they were Agency personnel we would not have much time on our own. The Agency was terrific at surveillance, and two white guys in downtown Nairobi would not be too hard to find no matter who was looking.
We walked into the lobby of the bank. There were private security guards stationed everywhere, including one on each side of a bank of ATMs. I inserted one of my Visa debit cards, punched in the four-digit code and hoped. Local shillings were all we were going to get from any ATM in the country, which was okay, except for the fact that the largest shilling note issued was for a thousand. With the exchange rate running at about seventy shillings to the dollar, that meant a
Thousand-shilling note was only worth about thirteen dollars.
I used four cards to get a total of sixty thousand shillings out of the machine. The stack of bills was over an inch thick. I shoved the folded wad into my back pocket and we headed for the door. Nine hundred bucks, or so, would have to do.
There was nobody noticeable on Kaunda Street, so we crossed to the Catholic Basilica. We went straight in through a huge gothic entrance. The place was straight out of the dark ages, with tourists gathered together in small guided clumps.
I took Burt all the way to the front of the huge old church and sat him in the front pew. Unconsciously, I genuflected before taking a seat next to him. The lighting was dim to the point of darkness. The place was perfect.
“Stay here. I’ve got to berth us aboard the train going east tonight.
I’m less noticeable alone. Whatever we ran into started down there, where Smith died, so we’re going back to the scene of the crime, if we live that long.”
I looked over at the big man, wondering what the hell he was doing. I was known for my rather unconventional behavior, which had gotten us into the mess we were in, but it was uncommon for wet workers like Burt to be anything but sticklers for following Agency directives and rules.
“What about the woman? You told her to meet us. You don’t think she’ll come?” Burt asked. I rubbed my forehead, thinking for a moment.
“I do think she’ll come, but I don’t want to take her to Mombasa on this, not that she would go. I wanted her to meet us so I could talk to her about what she knows. We can’t drive all night down to Mombasa. We’d be sitting ducks on that rough road. The Agency has drones. We have to hope that whoever is after us will calculate that we’ll run to Jomo and fly out as quickly as we can.”
“We’re going to Mombasa?” Burt asked.
“Yes, we’ve got to get out of Nairobi.
“We’re going to Mombasa,” Burt repeated, this time with a strange tone of enthusiasm. I had more questions about his involvement but they could wait until we were on the train.
I left him there, heading of across the downtown common area for the station. I realized that I should have asked to see if he had a second phone, when the cell phone in my pocket rang. It was Burt.
“I have another phone. The number’s on the dialer, titled King Kong.”
I thought about his self-derived nickname he had given himself. I tucked away a thought to examine his phone to see what he’d chosen for me.
“Thanks,” I responded, not knowing what to say. The man was proving to be an enigma, like maybe a bear with human intelligence would be. Burt hung up. I waited until I was tucked into a corner alcove of the Kenya Bank, right across Haile Selassie Avenue from the station, and then flipped the phone open again. I called Staff Sergeant Stevens, hoping he was still around. I was compromising the cell phone by calling the Embassy, but I had little choice. I had to have more data. I did not believe that the Agency had sent men to kill me. It was just not done. There was no need. They could just recall me and lock me up any time they wanted. They didn’t need to kill field agents. They had worse punishments. Imprisonment and loss of retirement were much more feared punishments, and very commonly applied. In the final analysis, when Burt had been instructed to shoot me, he had refused. Field agents did not kill field agents. There was no career left to an agent who participated in such action, and we all knew it. It was not even entirely believable that he had been ordered to do such a thing.
“I can’t tell you anything at this point,” Stevens said, without preamble. I held the phone out and stared at it for a second. Whether Burt’s phone was already target material, or whether Stevens had been waiting for an unknown call, I did not know, but there was no point asking. Stevens was a Marine, first and foremost, above wife, country and even God. It resonated through him.
“Is she coming?” I asked.
“Tower, in twenty,” he said, and then hung up. I turned to my right and looked up at the tallest building in East Africa. The Times Tower. That was the tower. Twenty, in Marine parlance meant twenty minutes. She was coming. I was relieved, and intrigued, by her conduct. I hadn’t been absolutely sure that she would come. Not nearly as certain as I’d led Burt to believe.
Seeing no one of any consequence over at the long cinder block construct of a railway station, I crossed the street and entered the facility. I was always surprised that it was clean. Even the bathrooms were clean. And the rain earlier in the day had helped, giving the place a fresh, although local, scent. I went to the line of booths under a sign that said “Kenya Railroad Berthing Allotment.’ I could not help looking around suspiciously as I approached the attendant behind his bars.
“Two, first class cabin for Mombasa.” The man looked at me, the black visor of his blue cap shined to a high luster. As a former Marine myself, I could tell that it was polished leather and not the fake Corfam junk. There was one train to Mombasa every night. It arrived there, from Nairobi, early in the morning. Tickets were booked in advance, and for cash.
“Papers,” the man said, primly, holding out one hand toward the slot
under the bars.
I took out my wad of shillings, peeled off four of them, then slid them through the slot. The 1st class fare to Mombasa was posted on the chalk board behind the man. It said nine hundred shillings. I waited. He stared down.
“For two,” he said. “Private room with clean bedding and first service in the dining car.” The money was gone when I looked down. I had not seen the man’s hands move. He took two tickets from a drawer, shoved them toward the slot, then looked behind him and made believe he was concentrating on something else. I let him, taking the tickets and walking back toward the platform, until I saw the woman.
A white woman stood out form the building, peering up and down the platform, as if looking for a train. But there was no train, nor would there be until the evening run was ready to be made at around seven. The events at the Safari Park had occurred so quickly and intently that I could not recall if the woman was the same as the one with the camera crew. But she was looking for something. And I knew I was being looked for. I went into the restroom without going out onto the platform. From a stall I called King Kong and filled him in, about the woman and about Joan’s pending arrival, now only fifteen minutes away. Burt’s analysis was better than mine. If the woman was there, then the others would be in the area. We decided that I would try for the Railroad Museum just north of the station.
Before leaving the bathroom stall I removed a full roll of toilet paper. I carried it with me in my right hand.
The station was not crowded, which was unfortunate for my purposes, although no one gave me the slightest glance as I went out to the street side, gained the far edge of the building, and then darted across a twenty yard concrete expanse. The Railroad Museum was right there, with an old engine and cars lined up next to it. I hid behind the cars, kneeling to look up from under them. I did not observe any extraordinary interest or pursuit. After a five-minute wait, I did see the woman. She stood at the outside lip of the wooden platform. She gestured with one hand toward someone who seemed to be in the direction of my position, but I couldn’t see who she might be waving at. Finally, I went through the door into the museum.
The object of the woman’s attention was obvious once I was through the door. A large white male stood in front of me, his arms extending up and outward, as if to engulf me. Without thinking of the potential of terrible repercussions, my left hand went down. I brought the small forty-five up out of my pocket, flicked off the double-sided safety and walked right into the arms of the huge man. His attempt to grasp me never reached conclusion. I jammed the AMT into the side of the toilet paper roll, pressed the arrangement hard into his belly and squeezed the trigger.
The sound was not nearly as loud as I thought it would be.
The toilet paper roll shredded, but the man, amazingly, did not go down. Instead he held both hands to his stomach, an awful expression of pain on his face and a mewling grown coming form his open mouth. I marveled. The man appeared to be made of something tougher than hide, gristle and hair.
I ran, using a casual lope, which covered ground quickly but made me look more like a jogger than someone running from something. The gun stayed clutched in my left hand, so small it was invisible to anyone who might have been looking my way. I could not have run with a two-pound chunk of metal in one front pocket.
One thick hand waved from around the far side of the bank building, as I approached.
“What happened?” Burt asked, when I pulled up next to him, reseating the gun out of view.
“What in God’s name are you using for ammo?” I shot back. I had never known a forty-five round, at close range, fired into a man’s torso, to leave him standing and complaining0.
“Shot-shell,” Burt said, rather ruefully. I waited, looking back around the corner for some sign of pursuit, but there was none. When my head swung back I spotted the Pajero across the side street, just pulling up to the steps of the Times Tower. Burt saw it to. We started out together while he talked.
“I load a cartridge of birdshot as the first round. In all my guns. I’ve had a few occasions where I shot the wrong guy. A few years back I decided that I’d rather apologize for causing pain and misery than live with the other result.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. The man was demonstrating an application of intellect and good judgment that I had never seen from any gun or pyrotechnics expert I had ever met. His forethought had saved the day. There would be no unexplainable dead body at the museum. No Caucasian ‘tourist’ slain by terrorists or robbers. The man I had hit would be marginally injured and very likely ambulatory. No cordons. No investigations. Our train trip was still possible.
“What’s the second round, some sort of nuclear device?” I asked, not entirely kidding. Burt didn’t answer. We were upon the car, which was not driven by Joan.
A young blond male with short hair sat behind the wheel. I got in behind him, while Burt went around. The DCM was in the front passenger seat.
“Drive into the traffic,” I told the kid, assuming he was one of Steven’s Marines. Without a word he wedged us in among the Matatas, trucks, and other conveyances trying to get from Kenyatta onto Mombasa Road. I looked behind us, but could not make out anything, but realized we had been either followed to the Railway Station without our realizing it or our behavior had been predicted.
“Thanks for coming,” I said to Joan, “and who are you?” I followed, rapping the youngster on his right shoulder .
“Corporal Sam Hill, Sir,” he answered. “I got the week off for leave but nowhere to go. Sergeant said I might come with you guys, if that’s okay.”
He looked to be a teenager to me, but most Marines do, as I get older.
“A guy just got shot back at the museum, and we’re being hunted by people we don’t know. Are you sure you want a piece of this?” I retorted. I didn’t mention that I’d done the shooting.
“Yes, sir,” the boy-child replied, filled with enthusiasm.
“Why’d you come?” I asked Joan, noting that her medium cut brown hair was perfectly combed. It seemed to float around her head. When she turned to face me, it bounced on its own a few times. I felt a warm glow. She’d carefully prepared to see me again.
“I wasn’t doing anything else,” she said, then smiled for the first time since I’d encountered her. I had a million questions I wanted to ask her but none of them had anything to do with our current situation.
“Thank you,” I repeated, getting control of myself, enough to find out what we needed to know. “How did your husband get involved in a CIA operation?” I asked her, directly.
“He’s not my husband, and I don’t know, but I know he did. What was it all about?” she asked me, in return. I noted that the nails of her left hand, draped over the side of the seat, were manicured, and painted to a high gloss. I could not tell the color, as blue was the only color I really saw well at all. Her eyes were intensely blue, with thick brows over them. I could see those. She had a stunning presence.
“What happened to Smith, down in Mombasa?” I countered, ignoring her question.
“It didn’t’ start in Mombasa,” she replied. “It ended there, down in that prison outside of town.”
“Shimo la Tiwa?” I asked? I knew the prisons of Kenya. Not hellholes like the prison typified in the movie Midnight Express, put out in the seventies, but dirty bad places to try to survive in, especially for a Caucasian.
“G.K,” she said, shaking her head, “I think it was called, from what I heard.”
G.K. were the two letters mounted above the iron grate entrance to Shimo prison. I’d never found out what they stood for, but I said nothing to Joan. We had a location to work back from. It was also instructive that Smith had been in prison, not in jail. It spoke of an unlikely permanence.
“Where did it start?” I asked her.
“What?” Joan replied, not focused on the data I was trying to get from her.
“Smith. You said all of it started somewhere. Where?” I asked, patiently.
“Oh,” she answered, taking her time. I wondered if it was because of perplexity or evasion. “At the Embassy. Smith came to see Paul at the Embassy.
Neither of them were happy about the meeting, but I don’t know what they talked about.”
“Was your Communications Director present for the meeting?” I inquired, wanting to know if the local CIA ‘cowboy’ stationed at the Embassy was involved.
“That guy?” she came back. “Tyrell? No, why would he be there?”
I couldn’t believe that the DCM of a major embassy could remain unaware of the facility’s only CIA operative, however ceremonial his role was, but I let it pass.
I would deal with Tyrell later.
“We’re going down there, to Mombasa,” I told her, not really understanding why I was giving her any information whatsoever. I just felt that I had to trust somebody and, for some reason I could not fathom, I found the DCM to be imminently trustable.
“The train. You’re taking the train tonight, aren’t you?” she correctly assumed. “You’re going after Rafiq, aren’t you?”
I didn’t answer. Rafiq Salim was the name of our Lebanese target from the mission. I tried to think of why Joan would think we would pursue him down in Mombasa. The Agency had informed me that he lived in Nairobi where he ran a jewelry business. Without prompting, she gave me the answer.
“He lives down there. His family runs one of the ferries.”
I almost groaned aloud. Whatever we were involved in just kept getting more and more complex. I couldn’t seem to find any truth in anything.
“What do you want me to do, sir?” the corporal asked.
“Well for one, Sam Hill, I want you to stop calling me sir. My name is Jack.” I didn’t make the obligatory joke about ‘Sam Hell’ as I presumed he had been living with that all of his life. “Then, when we’re done here, I want you to drive this vehicle down to Mombasa. You have a cell phone?” The boy handed me a white card, like the generic Marine Corps card Staff Sergeant Stevens had given me. There was a Kenyan number on it in pencil. A ton of numbers really, but they seemed to work.
I noted that he was attired in a worn canvas outfit, with lots of pockets. He looked like an assistant to a tour director for one of the tourist ‘safari’ adventures, or maybe one of the redemption-seeking workers for an aid agency. In Kenya to seek redemption from living a life of spoiled ease and meaninglessness.
Joan’s information, if it was valid, changed everything. Mombasa was revealing itself as the key to our mystery, or at least the place where the key might be found.
“When you get down there, and you should arrive hours before us, go to the Inter-Continental and hang out. I’ll call you. We need a car down there, and it might as well be this one.” I could not rent a car for cash in Kenya. Renting another car, no matter what the bribe, would take a host of paper and plastic backup I was not willing to give out. I no longer believed that the Agency was after us. But somebody with assets and motivation was. I was not going to give them anymore than I absolutely had to.
“The embassy is locked down,” Joan said.
“How’d you get out?” I asked, but then didn’t wait for an answer, already knowing that Stevens was at work. The Ambassador would be howling mad when he discovered his ex-wife, his DCM, was not there. “When you going back?”
“Tomorrow. I’ll catch a Matata home. I don’t understand any of this and I need to think, and maybe drink half a bottle of Grey Goose while I do it. Can we go somewhere and talk? Do you have time? Is there some place?”
I was surprised by her request. I was also surprised, however, that she had gotten out from under an embassy lockdown. The woman was starting to amaze me even more than Burt. We had several hours to kill before getting aboard the train, and we needed to be someplace where we could be off the streets. The bottle of Grey Goose sounded wonderful, but it was not to be.
“The Java House, on Argwings, just off Kenyatta, you know it?” I said to the corporal.
“Kinda,” he answered, biting the sir off before it came out of his mouth. He made me feel old and slow, totally unlike what I got from Joan.
“Make it so,” I said, emulating Jon Luke Piccard from Star Trek.
“Engage,” he laughed back, diving out of the traffic, across two medians and reversing our course of travel. I noted that another vehicle tried the same maneuver but only managed to create a massive traffic tie-up behind us. Whoever they were, they were persistent and good. Just not as good as a crazy teen-aged Marine driving a Pajero in downtown Nairobi.
“What changed?” I said to Joan, as the Pajero rocked back and forth, avoiding all manner of obstacles I tried not to pay attention to, only too happy to be taking the train instead of riding with Sam.
“What changed about what?” she retorted, holding fast to the sissy bar mounted above her window.
Communicating with the woman was maddening.
“We’re going to Mombasa,” Burt said, unaccountably.
http://from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com
What the hell, I'll put it on her anyway. What are they going to do, kick me off?
Closer to God
Hakuna Matata
III
The reinforced double-steel door of the underground parking lot slowly retracted sideways across our view. It was too impossibly heavy to rise vertically. We sat waiting in the Pajero, DCM next to me in the passenger seat and Burt just behind her. Staff Sergeant Stevens pushed another button and rock barriers at the top of the drive began to sink into pre-formed slots. He held up one hand, watching the stones, until they were gone, replaced by metal grates that snapped loudly into place. His hand moved and became a salute. The kind only a Marine is capable of making. I nodded at the man, putting the Nissan into gear. Mrs. Haggerty waved to him, as well, but I knew the salute was intended for me. I smiled my appreciation. His arm came down. He pointed at the windshield as I drove by. I looked at the small white card under the wiper, then reached my hand around through the open window and claimed it.
Bright afternoon sun had replaced the rain, and a cooling wind blew through the Pajero’s open windows, as we waited to take a left onto Limuru Road. Traffic was heavy, and Kenyan’s gave no quarter when it came to driving. We plunged into the melee but didn’t have far to go. Muthaig’s crowning feature was the Safari Park, Kenya’s only real five star hotel with any local flavor.
We waited to take the turn into the hotel.
“May I call you Joyce?” I asked.
“No, you may not,” the DCM shot back, not looking at me, instead examining the wedding band still located on the appropriate finger of her left hand. “You can call me Joan,” she relented. “I hate the name Joyce.”
“You look terrific, Joan,” I said, quite truthfully.
“Fuck off,” Joan stated, her voice evidencing disgust, “don’t try your smooth, urbane, man-of-the-world crap on me.”
I checked the rear view mirror, to see Burt trying to cover his smile with one hand. He avoided my eyes.
“Thank you,” she followed up, unaccountably. The woman was confounding me. I was afraid to speak, but felt somehow, that she wanted me to say something.
I was in a verbal minefield.
“How long have you been divorced?” I tried, figuring that almost every divorced person I had ever met loved to talk about the divorce, and how rotten the other person was.
“None of your God damned business,” she hissed, massaging her wedding band hand, but looking out the side window. I waited for more, but nothing came.
“Two years?” I offered.
“Two years?” she turned on me, speaking the words loud enough to make me raise my right shoulder and wince. “Two years? What kind of idiot are you? Oh, I almost forgot, you’re a spook. One of those Southern-Fried-Chicken-University types who populate Langley. What’d you major in, Bo Weevil Mating? If I’d been divorced for two years, do you think I’d still be the DCM for that idiot?” Spittle hit my cheek.
I heard a barely audible giggle from behind me, but I didn’t look in the mirror. I finally hustled the Pajero through the broken ‘tiger-teeth’ jam of the opposing traffic.
“Ah, no,” I blurted out to her series of questions, driving as fast as I could manage to get to the hotel as quickly as possible.
“No, what?” she yelled. “No, you have a degree is something else, like maybe Burro Husbandry, or ‘Poor-White-Trash’ farming?” I shook my head, in agony.
The huge pyramidal structure of the Safari Park main building appeared and I headed the car for it like it was a laser-guided smart bomb. Supposedly the willow reed thatched buildings had been designed with clues taken from native Kenyan hovels, but in truth, there was nothing in the country that looked like the place.
Without meaning to, I skidded the Pajero to a halt directly in front of the lobby, and jumped out. I moved around the vehicle to get Joan’s door, but one of the bellmen had already attended to that. She stood waiting. Burt was out and leaning against the back fender, as if ready to enjoy more of the show. The show being my complete humiliation.
Joan headed straight for the lobby. I followed closely behind her, noting how powerfully she strode, her black pumps clicking loudly across the tiled floor of the entrance. Burt ran into me, because I had run into Joan. She had stopped too suddenly for me to avoid her. The three of us grabbed one another and swayed.
“Oh great, slimed by a Halloween spook,” she exclaimed, pushing herself from my fumbling grasp.
“Would you stop that?” I said, as quietly as I could to her retreating back.
“Look what happened to the last guy who got outed on your watch?” I followed up. She flinched, but kept walking.
“Good one,” Burt whispered behind me, which made me frown.
We trailed behind the fast moving woman through the lobby and out the back, around a great blue pool surrounded with palm trees of all sizes, and on past the cascading series of wonderful waterfalls that gave all the interior rooms of the establishment a special serenity. The Hilton, and the Sarova hotels have better rooms than the Safari, but none can come close to matching its ambiance. I knew where we were headed. The Nyama Choma Ranch Restaurant was the only thing left between us and the Muthaiga jungle forest. It was simply the finest African food restaurant in Kenya. Nothing else was close. I yearned for an Ostrich steak covered in Monkey-brain gravy. No monkeys involved, of course. Its only a name.
Under one side branch of the falls I caught a flash of movement. Then it was gone. It had been part of a head, sticking out of the bushes, viewing our arrival. I slowed. Burt stumbled into me. I was a little shaken, as I came to a stop, while Joan disappeared into the opening of the restaurant.
“What?” Burt inquired, backing up a step.
“I wouldn’t take an oath on it, but I think the Lebanese just checked us out from beyond the falls.” The water pouring down upon the rocks made talking difficult, but Burt got my message. He turned automatically, putting a palm trunk between himself and the falls.
“You still got that hand cannon under your coat?” I asked, remaining in the open. If we had walked into an ambush no thin palm tree was going to save us.
Burt nodded, but did not make any moves to access it.
“Got anything else?” I asked, feeling a bit naked.
Burt showed me three fingers, held down at his side. Special Forces hand chatter. I always liked the one where the leader takes two fingers of one hand and aims them at his own eyes, so everyone will look at him. In practice, however, I’d found that the gesture, like so many, was all for show. Anybody who could see the gesture was already looking.
“Three?” I said, in amazement. “The Mau Mau’s were put down in 1960, for Christ’s sake. Give me anything small.”
Burt leaned down by genuflecting on right knee, hand sweeping back to flick the bottom of his pant leg upward. Quickly and smoothly, like an unfolding python, the thick muscular man rose up and delicately inserted a .45 Caliber AMT automatic into my open left hand. I stuck it immediately into my front trouser pocket. The five shot auto was small, yet as thick as a full blown Colt. The bulge was noticeable, but I had little choice. Klingon’s preferred to die fighting in combat, or so they said on Star Trek, and I was not going down unarmed.
“What does it mean?” Burt whispered, his eyes never leaving the area of the falls.
“I don’t know. Not good. What would he come here for? If Haggerty decided on Executive Action, then why would the man come where the man is? He’s a U.S. Ambassador, for God’s sake. And how would he know where he was? I haven’t been able to make sense out of anything since we were out there on the Serengeti.” Joan came back out of the restaurant, looking even more impatient then when she’d walked in.
“What the hell are you doing?” she hissed, clicking up to us.
“Admiring the falls,” I covered.
“Oh great, a gay spook and his cultured Troglodyte,” she complained, in exasperation. “Paul’s in there having lunch with one of his mysterious companions.
Should I announce you or do you want to make a grand entrance?”
“We’re coming. Please show us the way,” was all I could say. The woman did not elicit lengthy response, not without dealing out considerable pain.
“What’s a Troglodyte?” Burt asked, from behind. I was about to answer when I had another thought. I stopped again, this time with the four-top table, where the Ambassador sat with some unidentified white male, in sight. “Back out Burt, this could be a hit on Haggerty.” Why else would the Lebanese not take a taxi home, but instead head straight for his antagonist. Who was the Lebanese? He’d acted as prey, very convincingly, but he wasn’t acting that way anymore. Burt backed up to the restaurant entrance, and then disappeared into a hidden alcove. I moved to Joan’s side at the table.
“What’s this?” Paul said, slowly getting to his feet. He stared at me in surprise, and recognition. I stood stunned. The man could only have recognized me if he had a file photo. I relaxed a little as I realized that someone might have called him from the embassy. Cell phones worked amazingly well in Nairobi. I didn’t carry one but I was willing to bet that Burt had three or four under his “Q” designed safari rig.
“Sit,” I commanded the DCM, pulling out a chair for her. She hesitated.
“There’s danger here, sit and act like everyone else,” I continued. She took the chair. I sat at the one next to her, across from the two men. The Ambassador joined us.
“What,” he began, but I held up my right hand. I slid my left hand into the .45 pocket at the same time. The automatic was double action, I knew. In the silence over the table a distinct metallic click sounded. The automatic was off safety. All four of us sat frozen.
“You can worry about me later Paul,” I said, conversationally. “The same Lebanese, the subject of our attention a few hours ago, was out by the falls a few minutes ago. I let him off near the airport, where he was supposedly going to go into hiding. I might have erred and cost you your life, but I don’t want Joan here, or your friend, to go out with you. What do you think?” The waiter came over and placed water, without ice, in front of both Joan and I. We sat in silence.
“Ah, how sure are you,” Paul began to ask, but I cut him off.
“This is the Choma, and the waiter just brought us glasses of water, not bottled water like you have.” I smiled, wondering if the man would get it, as I prepared to go to the floor and attempt to crawl behind some nearby decorative rocks. If anybody opened up I could count on Burt to provide intense covering fire, but his ammo wouldn’t last long. The only safety might be found in staying less than a foot off the ground. An assassination at such a notable hotel and restaurant would have to be over in seconds. Surviving the first few seconds would be everything.
“The waiter’s not a waiter?” Joan said in a low tone, her voice shaking. “What have you done Paul? What are we in?”
“Alright,” the Ambassador said, ignoring his ex-wife and speaking directly to me. “Maybe I was wrong about you. I apologize. What do we do?”
I was amazed. The man was apologizing for attempting to kill me. I sighed.
Being an operational agent for the Agency could not be taught in schools or learned in books. It was too bizarre for that.
“We leave. Slowly, without fanfare, you move toward the kitchen over there Paul, while your friend heads for the washroom in back. Joan, you’re going out all the way to the street, where you’ll wait in the Pajero. You drive. I’m going to knock my silverware onto the floor, then lean down to pick it up. If there’s fire, then you all drop and stay where you are, without moving at all. If there’s fire, it‘ll probably be at me, here at the table, where they intended to shoot. The silverware hitting the floor is your cue. Got it?” Nobody said anything. “Tell me you got it?” I instructed.
Joan murmured something, while Paul and his companion said yes at the same time. I pushed my fork onto the floor. It hit with the sound of a ringing bell.
Everyone moved. I went to one knee, then leaned under the table and fell to my stomach, turning to bring the .45 out and up. I had no more time than that. The phony ‘waiter’ stepped out of the bushes holding an old-fashioned double barrel shotgun. The ends of the barrels looked huge, as he stood only two feet over me.
My AMT was only inches from his stomach. I laid there, looking up into his eyes while taking all the slack, and a little more, out of the .45’s trigger. Slowly, he moved the shotgun aside, cocking his head, as if in question. I gave him back the thinnest of smiles, wondering what Burt was thinking, since he wasn’t doing anything. The man stepped back into the bushes and was gone. I breathed for the first time since I’d hit the floor. I then crawled to the front of the restaurant, right past the host at the front desk. He looked down at me in amazement, until he saw the automatic in my hand. Then he dropped down and disappeared.
I got up and began loping back through the areas of the falls and pool. I saw nothing of anyone, save a few tourists laying near the water or taking pictures of everything around. At the main entrance I paused to observe some kind of film crew who were set up down near where cars circled to let people off. The Pajero idled near their large, tri-pod mounted, camera. Several large Caucasian men milled nearby, and one long-haired young woman. The passenger door snapped open. I saw Joan at the wheel and Burt’s hand sticking out from releasing the door. I jumped in.
“I think we’re gonna be famous,” I said, but nobody laughed.
Joan jerked the Pajero into gear and tore off back around the circle, headed for the traffic mess on Limuru Road. “What happened back there?” she asked.
I was about to answer her when Burt made a comment.
“The woman. I saw her. At the airport in Joburg. I think she was on my flight.”
I twisted around to face him, letting go of my seat belt.
“You flew direct from Johannesburg, and she was on the flight?”
Where where you flying to? You came down from Lake Victoria.”
I watched the big man closely. I had come to trust him, but I didn’t know just how far yet.
“Zurich. Then Zurich to down here. I met Walt up at the falls, to check it out. We had a couple days.”
“Shit,” I said, out loud, turning back to face Joan. “Pull down into the traffic, and then stop. Burt and I are getting out. You take the car to the embassy. You should be alright. I pulled Staff Sergeant Steven’s card from my shirt pocket.
Give me your cell phone number.” I took out my pen to write.
“Are you crazy? You’ll get killed out there. All this because somebody was on the same plane? And that whole restaurant thing? You’re looney and paranoid, and maybe dumb as a post.”
“The number,” I repeated, patiently. “There was a guy with a shotgun at the restaurant. I think he was there for your husband.”
“Double gun.” Burt added, from the back seat. I looked back to him in question.
“Looked like one of those Holland and Holland things. Big bore.
Elephant gun.”
I whistled. A gun like that would sell for a cool twenty-five thousand dollars, if not more. Whoever was involved in the mess we’d stepped into was very well heeled. And that was bad news indeed.
“He’s telling the truth?” Joan asked of Burt, her voice going up.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he replied. “Donner is the best there is. Not well liked, but the best there is.”
I would have commented but the back window of the Pajero blew out, along with the rear driver’s side glass. There had been no sound, except the whoosh and tinkle of breaking glass. Joan screamed, then drove recklessly right out into the middle of Limuru Road. Cars, vans and trucks careened and honked, but no contact was made. The SUV stalled out. I looked out the back, through the gaping hole, over the seat where Burt crouched down. The camera crew had scattered to cars and vans, now fighting one another to get out of the narrow driveway.
“The Railroad Station. We’ll wait there. When I call you, come get us.”
I flew between the seats and shot out the driver-side passenger door, Burt behind me.
“Like hell I will,” Joan yelled, “and you don’t have my number.”
I stood and put my hand up against the flow of traffic, which flowed around us like a thick school, of metallic fish. I liked the woman. She was tough as iron and she wouldn’t abandon us after we’d stood up for her. She’d figure it out.
A red mini-van, with a strange hand-painted poster of The Lion King splashed across its front, screeched to a halt, almost touching my hand. A gold stripe ran around the van’s body. I’d stopped a Matata, one of the thousands that constantly prowled the streets of Nairobi. They came in three kinds, regular, gospel and teeny. The regular one’s were for regular people, like most tourists. The gospel one’s blared reborn gospel music at impossibly volumes. The teeny ones were even worse, pumping out acid rock and rap. The latter two were mostly for locals.
Joan got the Pajero started. She joined the traffic flow. The side door of the Matata opened and a young hand waved. Burt and I crawled inside. There were already three teens inside, plus the driver and his ‘conductor,’ who collected the fare. Matatas had gotten their name from their original fare of three shillings. Now, the prices were variable, going all the way up to fifty shillings or more. Fifty shillings being about seventy-five cents American. The Matata didn’t move. Teeny conveyances were weird. They would carry people they liked, or thought were cool for free, or not let you in at all if they didn’t like your look. I could tell that the conductor didn’t like our look.
“You got any money?” I asked Burt. He shook his head. I stared at the evil looking teenager in front of me, trying to ignore the blast of horrid rap coming out of the Matata’s speakers. We had to get the hell out of there. I took off the Omega and held it up.
“Omega, Speedmaster, Astronauts took to the moon, four thousand U.S.” I said. The kid looked at the watch.
“Sare,” he said, then grabbed the watch. Sare, I knew, meant ‘free’ in the local street slang called Sheng. The kids spoke it, like pigeon in Hawaii.
“Sare, my ass,” I responded, angrily. “Railroad Station, right now.”
I tried to see out the windows of the mini van, to see if our new band of followers were there. They had to be. But I also knew they’d never be able to stay on us unless, somehow, they’d been able to attach a GPS unit to our specific Matata. Not likely. Not likely at all.
Matatas were the locusts of Nairobi streets, and they were nearly indistinguishable in outer appearance. We drove Limuru toward Mombasa Road in a veritable sea of them, our vast overpayment of fare overwhelming the driver’s natural tendency to stop for anyone else. Our teenage riders stayed with us to the station, without complaint or comment.
“Who were those guys, anyway?” Burt asked.
“Don’t know,” I answered. “They’re Caucasian, all of ‘em, and I don’t think they’re with the Lebanese. They look like Agency. And they fired on us.”
Ironically, a piece from the Lion King soundtrack blared out from the radio. Hakuna Matata played. I looked around at my fellow passengers. They didn’t seem to get the irony at all. Then the words of the song hit me. “Hakuna Matata! It’s a wonderful phrase. It means no worries for the rest of our days.”
I put my latest chapter of the espionage novel called "Closer to God," on the other blogsite I maintain: http://www.from-the-chateau-dif.blogspot.com, simply because some people have complained when I have put fiction on this site. Not that anybody seems to be reading much on the Obama site anymore. I never get comments at all. You could say that maybe my writing is just not good enough to elicit commentary, but I don't think that is it. The grassroots wonder of what was established by the initiation and continuation of this site before and right after the last election was quite something, and great fun to be a part of. But our population loses direction easily. Our culture bores even more easily. And being fickle today, at home and abroad, defines most Americans and most American policy.
We are making believe our money is worth something, and it is still working...marginally. We are making believe that there are actually jobs to perform in this country, instead of in China, India and Indonesia...where we sent them. Friedman stated, last week in the NY Times, that the fault for that is simply that Americans did not properly prepare and educate ourselves for the future, when they had the chance. The man is a liar and low-life cur, making millions while he laughs about why American's should quite justifiably be paid the same as Chinese peasants. And he golfs with the president, when he should more properly be water-tortured in Gitmo. But there is no real justice in the universe. There is only the eternal movement of information packets. Quantum mechanics. And there is no mercy, consideration, or even intellect at work in quantum activity. We are the merciful, the considerate and the intelligent part of this universe...when we choose to be. Right now, in this period of time, we are choosing to be dumb as hell, and reaping the benefits of that stupidity.
We are so busy admiring, and holding up to high exaltation, the phony 'stars' of our world, that our world is falling apart around us. In the Chicago Tribune, yesterday, the headline was all about people (including families, women and children) living in storage lockers, garden sheds and abandoned cars. The tragedy of it. Above that headline was a four inch column across the page, with a photo of a fifteen million dollar a year baseball player smiling out at us. The Sports section took that photo and made it the size of the whole page. How many people got the subtle distinction of the idiocy illustrated by that presentation? I wonder. Bret Favre is actually given tons of sympathy as he awaits the big Packers/Viking game on Sunday. Sympathy? How many million is he getting to play for two hours? I love his interviews, however. The man is a drooling idiot when it comes to discussing anything other than his 'game.' Its pretty funny, at least.
We are still in Afghanistan. We are fighting the Taliban. We are at war with the Taliban. What the hell happened to declarations of war and Congressional approval? Gone. We now go to war at a whim, or the opinion of a president. We actually are dumb enough to say that we are depending on our generals in the war theater to tell us whether we should increase or decrease our presence in the war! Now that is as dumb as asking Bret Favre! What general in his right mind is going to say "Oh, cut my troops in half please!!" What do generals do? They make war. How do they get advancement and more power? They make war. And they do it like Bret Favre, by being exposed to about as much danger as a taxi driver or deliveryman. Others are fighting and dying, or coming home with PTSD so bad they will never have any bliss in their lives. We are torturing the wrong people. We have a whole line of bankers, generals and even sports stars whole could profit us all mightily with just a few turns of the screw.
Maybe, one day, prior to the coming disaster in 2012 (Oh please God, bring it on), the common man can celebrate the common man again. They guy or gal working to actually make cars, the people building our roads, the nurses, baristas, waiters and cooks. And those people living in storage lockers (until they are outed and thrown in the streets, because you can't be allowed to live in a storage locker!) who are somehow trying to held life together instead of becoming insurgents.
And that is what is next if we do not make some changes. We will have insurgency here in this country, and we will be no more able to stop it here than we were able to in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. We have a fiction of stopping it in Iraq, and we are going to try applying that same fiction to Afghanistan. We fortify the main population centers, then construct armored conduits to connect them, travelled by heavily armored vehicles. Then we claim that our 'surge' has worked. The natives laugh at us, as they properly should. We are not at war with Iraq or the Taliban. We are at war with our own self-imposed ignorance, and our willingness to glorify the ephemeral stupidity of stardom.
CLOSER TO GOD
Sea of Heartbreak
II
The water has always meant a lot to me. Off the beaches of Oahu I made my mark, surfing Queens and body-surfing Sandy. Victoria Falls called me from the far Northern canyons of Upper Kenya. Its thunder only evident form reports spoken by people who’d been there. I was not one of them, but I was going to be. I just knew it. But I couldn’t go before I finished what I was about.
Jomo Kenatta Airport in Nairobi is a mess. But so is the whole country. I drove the Pajero there, following my drop of the Lebanese. I had dumped him on the edge of town, to be taken back to where ever the hell he was going to hide out, by local taxi. Burt, Tom and Walt were my concern. I needed them gone in order to consider and act upon what I had learned from the nearly dead Lebanese. I threaded my way through traffic in front of the airport, easily and fluidly, like a man piloting a vehicle in which he really did not care who he violated or struck. I was all of that.
I pulled over at the SAS sign. I waited for the three men, who had been my mission companions, to depart. They too could take cabs to wherever they were going, as they would not be getting rid of their armament in the airport proper. Tom and Walt got out without comment. Burt stayed in the font passenger seat, however. I motioned for him to go, but he simply shook his head. I shrugged. What could I do? The mission was over. The team dispersed independently following a mission. There was no precedent for the way the man was acting.
When the Pajero’s doors were closed I sat in silence, the car’s tiny six cylinder engine humming quietly.
"Well, what the hell is this? Where do you want me to deliver you?" My questions had merit and made sense. Burt chose not to interpret things that way.
"Take me wherever you're going," he said, nonsensically.
I massaged my forehead with my left hand. Some local in uniform pounded on the car’s curbside fender. I put the shift lever in first and pulled away into the sea of chaotic traffic I so much enjoyed swimming in. I did not drive with a purpose. Instead I eased along with the other ill-mannered drivers avoiding contact.
“I’m headed toward the embassy,” I said, not comprehending why Burt was still in my car.
“Figured…” he replied, “but that’s probably a bad idea.”
I was stunned by his response. I pulled the Pajero to the side of the road, running two wheels up over a cracked and broken curb. We sat there. Women walked by with stuff piled four feet high atop their heads. Passing cars beeped in anger at the slight blockage our vehicle left by the side of Outer Ring Road. They were not without complaint. Only Mombasa Road was busier.
“Is Burt your real name?” I asked, not looking at the man.
“Is Jack Donner yours?” he replied. I nodded.
“Bertram Lauren, like the clothing guy, Burt said. I gave him my hand and he took it.
“You want to tell me about it?” I began, hoping for anything, but not expecting the response I got.
“You have a reputation, with that big brain of yours,” he began, telling me without saying it that he had known my real name all along. Burt was removing himself from the realm of normal Knuckle-dragger stock very quickly. “Back there, out on the Serengeti, you missed something. I thought you’d catch it, but you didn’t.” He didn’t go on, although I waited.
I thought back to our operation.
“The suppressor,” I said, tentatively. I had caught it subliminally. We had been given an assignment out on the Veld of Africa. There was no need for a suppressor. Silencers were large, uncomfortable to carry and difficult to properly conceal. They also identified anybody who had one as a potential professional killer. Why had Burt carried one, then installed it with me by his side? I turned my head to look at the bigger man, for the first time since leaving the airport. I felt a slight taste of fear. I didn’t like where our conversation was going. At all. But I said nothing. There was nothing for me to do but wait. I was unarmed and trapped inside a vehicle with someone who was not only well armed but a coldly-capable professional killer.
“I don’t work for State. Whatever that guy said once about a warm bucket of spit, well he should have been talking about State.” Burt spoke the words in obvious frustration, not looking over at me. “And you’re an agent for Christ’s sake. We don’t do agents. Not ever.”
“John Garner, Vice-President under Roosevelt,” I replied, still uncertain of what might happen. “He was talking about the Vice-Presidency as a job, but I understand what you mean.” Burt’s comment about me being an agent, therefore not target material, had jarred me. I had responded from the analytical quadrant.
“Why’d you talk to the guy? The mission brief said that we were, under no circumstances, to question or listen to the man.” Burt made his comments as if under great duress. I hoped that he was not still making up his mind about what he would or would not do.
“I found our instructions to be questionable,” I replied, honestly. “The mission is mine once the operation begins. You know the rules. The dead agent was named Smith. Ex-Marine. Decorated. Class act. He had a wife and three kids. You?”
Burt looked over and met my eyes.
“No, I got nobody,” he stated, his voice flat.
“Me either,” I replied, my voice pitched to the same tone.
“For them, then,” I finished. Burt shook his head.
“Brain damage would be too light a phrase to use for this kind of thing. More like brain death. We don’t know anything. We have nothing. What the hell can we do?”
I breathed easier. It didn’t seem, for the moment, like I was going to die on the front seat of a rental Pajero in downtown Nairobi. The car’s air-conditioned interior was, again, cool enough.
“Haggerty. He’s who we have,” I said.
“Just what do you know?” Burt asked.
“The Lebanese was dead on Haggerty’s orders. He was the one sent in to out Smith. That’s what he said, and I believe him. But what the hell was Smith doing in that prison? And why did he get taken out for the revelation? By who? No, all we have is Haggerty. What were your instructions, and from who?” I waited for Burt to consider. The kind of thing we had become involved in was off the books. There was no Agency support or approval for what we were discussing.
“My Control Officer told me that there was a possibility that you might go rogue,” Burt said, his mouth twisted into a strange smile. “Its not unheard of you know, especially with…well… your track record.”
Somehow, Haggerty, probably with the support of one of the many Assistant Secretaries of State, had reached deep into Agency Operations. The violation was monumental. I reflected for a moment. Such things happened in movies, like ‘Three Days of the Condor,’ but not in real life. Not in my experience, or the experience of any of the senior agents I had ever known.
“I’m going to the embassy. You in or out?” I put my right hand on the knob of the center shift lever.
“I don’t know,” Burt answered, but his own hand did not grab for the door handle. I put the Pajero in gear and headed North on Outer Ring. I drove the car carefully, trying to think of every detail of what had happened.
“Why was the Lebanese out there in the game park? What was he doing with the Masai? They aren’t normally violent, but they had him pretty painfully tied,and in bad shape.”
I talked to myself, as Burt made no comments at all. The roads to the embassy took us through Muthaiga where the Safari Park Hotel was located. Once a retreat for British Army Officers it had grown to be my favorite hotel in all of Africa, when I could cheat the Agency out of enough money to stay there.
The embassy loomed up from one side of the road we took winding around the Kenya Teachers facility. The place was built like the concrete and steel blockhouse it had been intended to be. The previous embassy, taken out by terrorist bombs years before, had been downtown by the Railroad Station. The embassy was totally obvious in its American ugliness, even without the huge U.S. flag waving out front.
I drove around the side of the structure where a big driveway led to the underground garage. It was blocked near its entrance by huge movable chunks of stone. I stopped to wait. We didn’t wait long. A Marine Staff Sergeant walked up the ramp to our car. I sighed in relief. It was Stevens, the contingent commander. I’d known him in Hong Kong when he’d been a Buck Sergent. I wondered if he’d recognize me.
“You packing, sir?” he asked, making no motion to salute, instead moving up and down the side of the Pajero to see what he could of the vehicle. I said that we were.
“Get out and go down the driveway. They’ll see you on the camera and let you in. Leave the keys.” We did as instructed, my faith in the United States Marine Corps once more confirmed. Once inside we waited for the Staff Sergeant to return, while a PFC and a Corporal stood silently by, checking us out but not being invasive about it, or patting us down. The Staff Sergeant was buzzed through the steel door. He tossed the car keys to me, then walked past us through an open door.
“Better see the DCM about what to do. The Communications Director is out of embassy,” he threw over his shoulder. I moved to follow him, waving Burt to accompany me. The Deputy Chief of Mission was second only to Ambassador Haggerty himself. I understood the Staff Sergeant’s predicament. The Communications Director was code for Embassy CIA contact. Every embassy and consulate in the world had one. Without him to front for us, someone of upper management power would have to make decisions, which fit into my plans exactly.
Three flights of stairs up at a run brought us to a hallway inlaid with exotic woods, common to Eastern Africa. Burt and I stood catching our breath. Stevens saluted crisply, pointed at an open office doorway a few yards away, then departed back down the stairway. I walked into the office, its floor covered with a beautiful baby-blue rug so thick that my entrance was made in complete silence.
A middle-aged woman sat at a large desk facing the door, flanked by two smaller desks nearby, where two younger women sat. None of them paid immediate attention to our presence. I noted that atop the larger desk was a small nameplate with the word “Haggerty” carved across it, and presumed we were in the Ambassador’s outer office.
“Is Haggerty in?” I asked, deliberately failing to use the man’s title. I wasn’t in a formal mood. The woman looked up. A Bose Sound Machine behind here played some country tune as she appraised us. “How did I lose you, oh where did I fail…” came out of the expensive little device.
“Who’s asking?” she asked, “And what are you doing up here unannounced?”
“I’m Jack Donner and this is Burt,” I waved one hand back, as I spoke, my tone mildly respectful. I ignored her second question. I also noticed her color and expression change.
“Who let you in?” she asked, as if inquiring about pet animals, her voice becoming more demanding. The other two women stopped working and looked at us, reacting to her tone.
“Is Haggerty here or not?” I overrode her, raising my voice slightly.
“I’m Haggerty,” she shot back, standing. I noted that she was a beautiful well-formed woman.
“You’re Paul Haggerty?” I was shocked.
“No, I’m his ex-wife, Joyce. I’m the DCM.”
“They allow that?” I squeaked out.
“Who?” she said, leaning aggressively toward me, putting her hands down on the surface of the desk. I just shook my head, nonplussed, then decided to regroup. State was a weird place I hated and would never understand.
“I’m here about Smith, who died a few days back. You probably heard something about that.” I moved a step closer to her.
“Leave us,” she stood, sweeping her arm toward the two other women, who instantly filed out, closing the thick wooden door behind them. “I presume, for whatever misplaced reason, that you’re here to report the accomplishment of your mission?”
I stared at Joyce Haggerty in wonder. I had never been a part of any direct mission discussions with embassy staff before. It was unheard of in my experience.
“It would seem that just about everyone knows about that mission,” I countered, indicating my surprise, as I thought more deeply about it.
“Did you perform it successfully?” She said, crossing her arms, and looking back at me with a severe expression.
“Maybe you misunderstood something, either before, or right this minute,” I said. “I don’t report to you. I don’t take orders or mission assignments from you, and I sure as hell don’t discuss the results of such matters with you, or your husband, for that matter.”
“Ex-husband,” she said, raising her own voice. “So what are you doing here then?”
Her comment stopped me. What was I doing there? I was coming right back at a man who had somehow co-opted operations people at CIA to risk taking me out if I failed to perform to specification on a mission. But I wasn’t going to say that.
“The Lebanese told me Paul sent him in, to give the information about Smith.”
Slowly, Joyce returned to her seat, looking pensive.
“What are you going to do?” She asked, after a minute. I was surprised again. She was giving me nothing by her responses. Did she know? What did she know? How deep was she in? It was almost like being debriefed by an Agency Control Officer. You gave, you did not get. I liked her. She was bright, good-looking, enough miles on her to give her wisdom, and she didn’t take any shit.
“Paul and I are going to have a little talk,” I told her, truthfully.
“About what?” she came back.
“About what Smith was doing in that prison. About what the Lebanese was doing in that park. About why an experienced agent was killed in an allied country that couldn’t give a damn about his affiliations. And some other personal stuff.”
I didn’t tell her that I was going to have a possibly terminal discussion about someone who had ordered me dead.
“Don’t,” she stated. I saw honesty in her expression. “Go your way and leave it alone. It isn’t your job or your fight. Get on an airplane. You don’t want to be anywhere near this. You’re not that good, no matter what your reputation, otherwise you’d have just done your job.”
She knew I had not allowed the Lebanese to be killed. The longer I was in front of the woman the more she was getting out of me.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“He’s not here,” she responded, shaking her head.
“That’s not what I asked, I pushed her. Burt moved to my side.
“I’m not telling you. I need him undamaged, for the moment, and I don’t like the look of your pet gorilla.” I marveled at the woman’s courage, even if she was in her own office inside a U.S. Embassy. She knew she wasn’t in front of regular diplomatic personnel. She also had let me know that she either knew, or had guessed, that I might have good reason to be violently disposed toward her ex-husband.
“You know this is going to resolution in some fashion. I can’t let it go, not and survive out here. Look at us. We have nowhere else to take this, and I think you know it.” I looked at the man standing next to me, to make sure Joyce had not reached him emotionally, but I need not have bothered. Burt had reverted to his Knuckle-dragger role. He stood impassive, as if there had been no insult intended by the woman’s harsh words. I looked back at her, and we waited.
The CD repeated its play, the same song coming up again; “…the lights in the harbor don’t shine for me…” played quietly through the room.
“What is that song?” I asked.
“Its called ‘Sea of Heartbreak,’ she answered.
“How very appropriate,” I said. She sniffed, but I saw a fracture in her visage when she did. Quickly, she turned her head, then leaned forward to take a call. Somewhere inside the hardened career woman was a heart.
Burt and I waited some more. Finally, she was done.
“I’ll take you to him,” Joyce relented. She stood, then walked around the desk. She wore a knee length blue dress. Classy. I liked the effect, but I gave no indication. I didn’t have to, as she read me anyway.
“I don’t like people who do what you do, or in your line of work, so don’t bother with the phony charm. You have no morals left, if you had any to start with.” I could not help smiling at that. Not that she was wrong, I hadn’t resolved such issues for myself yet, but that she would say it to my face made her more attractive still.
“Just tell us where he is and you can avoid being seen in our company,” I said, not being able to avoid smiling at her last insult.
“He’s at the Safari Park Hotel, not far from here, but you’ll never find him without me, and besides, I don’t trust you…and Brutus here,” she pointed at Burt. “Nobody else out there will know what you are. None of you people look like you should.”
I wondered how I should look. We followed her, as she opened the door and headed for the stairs. It was fun to follow her. For some unaccountable reason her company made me feel human for the first time since the mission had begun.
Blood might flow across the wooden floors of the Safari Park but I would endeavor to see that it wasn’t hers. She moved fast down the stairs, getting ahead of us.
“How did I lose you, oh where did I fail…” I sang, almost inaudibly.
“On the sea of heartbreak,” Burt whispered, coming down the stairs right behind me.
Copyright 2009
Give Me Strength
I
God is out there somewhere. I don’t know where. Once, when I was in an African prison I yelled back at some would-be reborn Christian preacher: “God has never come to my bunk.” He had been, as is the custom of reborn preachers, ministers or flock-leaders, indicating that God had spoken to him in the night, and instructed him regarding something I ought to do. For some reason God never instructs His acolytes in what they ought to do on their own, other than raise money and make members of the flock serve them.
It does not say, anywhere in the Bible, that God will not give you a burden too heavy to carry. That common saying is just pure bullshit. Think about the death camps in Germany, just for a second, and consider such idiotic God-driven nonsense. I do not believe you can ‘Trust in God,’ or even ‘Let go and let God.’ I think those are buzz-phrases created by reborn idiots. I do believe that if you pray to Him for strength, however, that He will definitely send you more problems so you can grow stronger in attempting to deal with them. My own life is proof of that little homily.
Nobody knows I smoke. Not one soul living on this planet. A couple of people used to know, but they died shortly after they discovered my secret. I don’t like to execute people without some ceremony. Instead of offering the intended victim a cigarette, however, I have one myself. They get the extra time while I finish the process of smoking it. That’s only fair. I smoke Marlboro cigarettes. The long ones with filters. Like the guy on the horse in those old ads. He died of lung cancer, I heard sometime back. I don’t think I’m going to die of lung cancer. I picked a career, or rather it picked me, that will likely preclude that.
It was raining just beyond my tucked-in corner of the railroad station. I smoked there because the station was filled only with members of the native population.
They knew I was nearby, back pressed firmly into the peeling wooden boards, but they made believe I didn’t exist. To me that was the same as not knowing anything.
About my smoking secret, I mean. The natives were like Knuckle-draggers, they didn’t count as living souls. They were just there, like the rocks, the trees or even the rain. I’m not prejudiced on the basis of color. I’m just prejudiced on the basis of the business I’m in.
When it rains in Nairobi, it rains for quite some time. The water coming down is clean, however, unlike the rest of the dusty dirty city. I love Nairobi, don’t get me wrong. And I love the rain in Nairobi because it drives everyone inside, then cleans the streets and universally broken sidewalks. I walk in the rain. I breathe it in. Plus its cool. Nairobi is pretty hot most of the time. I like it cool, but I don’t get many assignments up on the Bering Sea, or down in Tierra del Fuego. Africa is kind of my beat. And I’m not a Knuckle-dragger either. I don’t do the wet stuff at all. I’m one of the rather more rare guys who have guys who do that sort of thing. Maybe there are a few women who do what I do, I don’t know. I’ve never met one, or even heard of one, but these are changing times. Some of those guys, the Knuckle-draggers, were who I was standing near the rain waiting for. The train was overdue out of Lake Victoria, stopping in Nairobi, before making its way down to Mombasa.
Across the tracks I could see old rusting steam engines sitting on bare ground. Steam had given way to diesel ten years back. I remember riding the steam- powered train down to Mombasa, so long ago. The night had been filled with burning cinders, falling down and away past the dining car windows. It had not seemed romantic at the time, but in retrospect it was all of that, and more. I wistfully drew in the last of the Marlboro smoke, then pinched out the stub and replaced it in my red and white cardboard pack. I would leave no evidence of my secret behind, not that anyone around me cared. Kenyan natives are great. They pretty much respect and appreciate white folk, like me. They give deference and they don’t get in your face, as in some other cultures.
The train came in. Just like that. No whistle of warning. I was not in Europe or America. The rules were different. The old cars rocked slowly to a stop, compressed air hissing out from the brakes, resembling steam, up and down the line. I waited.
The natives crammed aboard the train as the passengers tried to get off. It was a mess of water-soaked bedlam, but it wasn’t noisy. The people of Kenya are a quiet lot. Another feature I like.
My guys climbed down just as the whistle of the engine finally sounded, indicating that the train was pulling out. Conductors in blue sweaters and black caps pushed and pulled stragglers aboard. The train creaked as it eased from the station. I turned and headed for the gray Nissan Pajero parked illegally in front. It was an old rental thing with a five speed, unlocked because there were no locks, only holes in all the doors. But I had left nothing inside. I carried nothing except my cigarettes, money and a passport. The rental papers for the car were not even there, as I wouldn’t return the vehicle, just call and tell the agency where to pick it up. My guys would have stuff. It was what they did. If they got caught with any of it, then they’d have to count on some other operatives to get them out of trouble. Or not.
I drove. Two of them in the back and one up front with me. We didn’t talk. They knew the mission. We were not, and were not going to be, friends. If there was to be violence I didn’t want to be grieving over the loss of any of them, or they of me.
Fucking New Guy Syndrome we’d called it, after the Nam. And it had its proper place in our work.
I drove fast. As fast as a three liter Pajero would go, which was not that fast at all.
One hundred and forty kilometers per hour was about max, which was about seventy miles an hour, or so. The roads out of Nairobi were built for about half that, however, so it was a rough scary ride. The guys gave no indication of discomfort or fear, however. It was that kind of business.
We were headed for a village just South of the big National Wildlife Park outside of Nairobi. I never could remember the park’s name. The village is a Masai place. The Masai are tall lanky natives who wear weird throw-back attire and carry long ugly spears. The men, anyway. And they stink to high heaven, as they never ever wash. Ever. I like them, but then, my former wife had once told me that I had no sense of smell. I guess didn’t have much taste in women either. I’d never found any who trusted me. And I couldn’t be around people who didn’t trust me. If they were ‘inside the wire’ kind of women, part of my tribe, then my trustworthiness should have been beyond question. I trusted them. But women don’t trust so easy, I discovered. So I was alone. I worked in a field that did not lend itself well to either trust or believability. Alone was not okay, but it simply had to do.
The village appeared next to the road about twenty clicks on the other side of the park. The inside of the Pajero was filled with dust, even though the rain had done a lot to cut it back. The park had been nothing but dirt roads and dust. Rain only sealed the top inch of the dust, and the dust went down a good four inches deeper than that. The village was a ram-shackle affair of branch constructed hovels, mud huts and half-thatched roofs behind flimsy fences. The fences were to keep animals in, not out. No self-respecting lion would ever allow itself the indignity of being speared full of holes on the interior open plaza of a Masai village.
I drove through a likely hole in the fence. Chickens and a few dogs scattered. I knocked down a few small pieces of stacked junk, and maybe a three-stone fireplace or two. I parked in the center of the village and shut off the engine. We sat. Nobody appeared. The Knuckle-dragger next to me spoke for the first time.
“I’m Burt, and these are Tom and Walt,” he said, as he pointed toward the back seat.
I didn't laugh when a cloud of dust formed near the end of his extended finger.
“Hey,” I responded, looking carefully at each of them. We would not be friends, but our mutual survival was now dependent upon the performance of each of us. Missions involving violence seldom ever went smoothly. Aberrantly strange things were always cropping up.
“The target is being held somewhere nearby. I don’t know where. Our contact is supposed to meet us here." I said the words with finality. We were not going to go social at this tense point of the mission.
I looked at my Omega. It was the same watch the astronauts had worn to the moon. Or so the salesman had told me when I’d purchased it. It was pretty damned accurate, I had to admit. Our source had twenty minutes to make contact or I’d scrub the mission. While we waited, we were targets ourselves. It was a risk that came with the territory. We waited in the vehicle. It wasn’t likely that any force was going to take out four white guys, armed to the teeth, sitting inside a rental four-wheel-drive in the middle of a pacified Masai village. Getting out could lead to booby-traps or other hidden hazards. We waited inside.
A tall Masai warrior appeared between two of the hovels to our front. He motioned with his characteristic spear. The four of us got out of the vehicle. I looked at my guys to assure myself that nobody was coming out locked and loaded. Violence escalates from the things you do before violence happens, I knew. We needed to be just four white guys walking, escorted, across the Serengeti. Everyone was cool.
We followed the nearly seven foot tall native through the saw grass just East of the village. It was a well-beaten path so we had no trouble. We could have followed the tribesman with blinders on, as his aroma was that overpowering, even twenty feet back. I do have a sense of smell I thought, sending a mental message to my ex-wife.
We came upon a clearing at the base of one of those huge Baobab trees, its trunk at least twenty feet thick. A man lay on his side next to the tree, his hands tied behind him with what appeared to be vines. The man was white, wearing the phony safari gear so common to visiting tourists. Even his canvas hat was there, on the ground next to him. I was surprised by that, as the Masai are known for stealing anything not tied, glued or welded down. The warrior stood next to the laying man, planting the base of his spear down on the man’s torso. He looked at me, but said nothing.
I pulled a two inch stack of Kenyan Shillings from my back pocket. I’d exchanged two hundred dollars worth of U.S. currency at the rail station. I handed the warrior the cash. He grabbed it, then walked away immediately, back toward the village. I waited until the five of us were the only humans evident out on the Savannah. Then I crouched.
“You alive?” I asked the downed man. His eyes opened. He nodded vigorously. I stepped back. Automatically, Tom and Walt grabbed the man by his shoulders and roughly seated him, back to the Baobab trunk. They backed away.
“Burt,” I whispered. Carefully, Burt took a medium sized automatic out from under his rain coat and handed it to me. Then he reached inside the coat a second time and came out with a polished black cylinder. I handed the automatic back. Burt finished assembling the silenced killing machine.
“We’re not supposed to talk to you, but what the hell, I never do exactly what they tell me to do anyway,” I offered to the man against the tree, by way of passing time, as I moved to get my pack of Marlboros out.
“I did it,” the man whispered out. “I know you’re his people. I did it. I went to that prison and told them about him. I admit it. But I had to do it. If I didn’t do it he’d have ruined my family. Our business would have been gone. We have nowhere to go. We’re Lebanese. We’re not welcome anywhere. We don’t even have passports.
I even dressed like a tourist, just like he told me.”
I sat on my haunches, no longer reaching for my box of cigarettes. The mission was to take out the man who had deliberately informed on one of our agents, getting that agent very dead, indeed. Payback was uncommon to the intelligence business, I knew, at least payback in violence, but there were certain circumstances. This had appeared to be one of them, as the dead agent had also been a highly decorated former Marine Officer and well connected politically. Unlike myself, he’d also been rumored to be well-liked. The fact that I’d been instructed not to talk to the target had not gone down well with me, although I had not remarked at the time. If I have to be involved in someone’s passing, I like to make certain that some sort of justice in the universe is being balanced.
“What have you got for me?” I asked. The Lebanese just looked back at me.
“If we are not to end this all right here, then you have to give me some reason why your passing should not take place.” I stared into the man’s black eyes, seeing nothing but truth. Everything thing he’d said so far had reeked of truth, and that made me very uncomfortable.
“I don’t have anything,” the man said, his chin sagging to his chest.
“Who was going to destroy your family?” I prompted him. He looked up. Then he looked from Burt to the other two Knuckle-draggers, then back at me. I stood, both knees and the small of my back in pain at the same time. I grunted.
“Take a hike out on the Serengeti for a bit,” I said to Burt. He grimaced, then handed the suppressed weapon to me. I took it. I knew the three of them probably had six more weapons among them, or more. Knuckledraggers were big on toys and equipment, cramming diplomatic sacks with all manner of pyrotechnics.
I waited for the guys to get a good thirty yards down the path, before I squatted back down.
“Paul Haggerty,” the Lebanese expelled with one soft breath. I said nothing back.
I didn’t have another question. I was too shocked. Paul Haggerty was the American
Ambassador to Kenya. Ambassadors never ever get involved in operational agency business, at least I had never heard of it happening before. For an Ambassador to be involved with the killing of a field agent was almost too impossible to consider.
“I understand that you have to kill me. But my family. They won’t be hurt, will they?
I have a wife and four children.” He tried to go on but I held up one hand in front of his face.
“Do you have any idea why Paul would want the agent dead?” The Lebanese shook his head violently. “Do you have any idea who killed our man?” I followed up, beginning to wonder exactly what had taken place in that prison outside of Nairobi.
Kenya was not exactly an enemy of the United States. The Soviets were long gone.
Terrorism was mostly a geographically limiting situation, excepting 9/11, of course.
Why the revelation that a man was an agent of the CIA would get him killed in a place like Kenya had no comforting answer that I could come up with.
The man shook his head again. I believed everything he’d told me. But I didn’t know what to do with it.
I rose to my feet once again with same groan. I stepped away from the Baobad and saw Burt pacing in the distance, nervously. If I got myself killed it would not look good in the after-action report, for him, or the other guys. They had to do what I said, but they also had to protect me. I waved him back.
“Cut him loose,” I said, when the three had shambled back. I handed the silenced weapon to Burt. “We won’t be needing that.”
Tom and Walt got the Lebanese to his feet and cut through the vines. The man glanced around him like he was some sort of hunted bird, looking for the next direction of attack.
“What do I do?” he asked, finally. I took the eighteen remaining hundred dollar bills of mission cash from my front pocket. I put the small stack into his hand.
“We’re taking you back to your family. Then you’re going to disappear for a few weeks while I get this all sorted out. And I mean disappear. Do you understand?”
“You did not know?” the Lebanese asked me, looking at my three guys, without going on. I shook my head.
“There will be trouble, I think,” he said, with an air of finality.
The village was as dead when we returned, as it had been when we’d arrived. It was obvious that no one had touched the Pajero. The villagers wanted nothing to do with us. As I drove madly toward Nairobi, the Lebanese wedged in between Tom and Walt in the back seat, I supposed that nobody in the U.S. Embassy was going to want anything to do with us either.
Helium and Hydrogen are both lighter than air, which gives containers, which are small enough in mass, the ability to rise above the earth. Vacuum has this same ability, although it would be very difficult to build a vacuum container of light enough materials to be able to rise. Today, following the disaster of the hydrogen filled Hindenburg in the 30's (it burned up catastrophically), we use helium to fill some balloons for flight (it is not flammable).
Richard Heene used helium to fill his small weather balloon the other day. Somehow, the small balloon became untethered and flew away. The rest of the story is now becoming history. But it is more a history of what is happening to our current media than it is about balloons, or even the rather 'different' Heene family.
The balloon was so small it could never have provided the lift necessary to carry a passenger, even one as small as a six year old child. But the media ignored that fact. Falcon Heene, the child in question, found a place to hide following his involvement with the untethering of his father's weather balloon. The child's disappearance, at the same time that the balloon was running free, was all that was needed for the national media to spring into action. The child's potential participation in the balloon's flight, as a passenger, was trotted out as being the 'story.' No investigative reporting was done at all. The National Guard was called in. Helicopters were dispatched. Wolf Blitzer was alerted. And across the United States television sets were isolated to this 'late breaking news story,' while cameras followed the balloon's uncontrolled floating with attentive abandon. When the balloon finally landed, in full view of every television watcher in the nation, the authorities at the scene did not even examine it for the possibility of its having a passenger aboard. They already knew that there was no one aboard. But Blitzer, and company, went on and on. Since the child was not aboard the craft (which could never have carried him) then it was speculated that the 'basket' which must have been attached to the thing, had somehow dropped off, with the boy inside it. The story raged on for hours, as hypothetical searchers combed hypothetical woodlands and housing developments for the non-existant basket and boy. Late in the day the boy was found to be at home, hiding from the potential wrath of his father, for letting the expensive balloon go in the first place.
The news lemmings gathered off-camera. Wolf and his team at CNN. The saga of the deliberate scamming Heene family was born. The family had been on 'Wife Swap,' and was therefore very knowledgeable when it came to dealing with the media. The Falcon child's name was changed to 'Balloon Boy,' and the attacks began. The Falcon child made as light verbal slip-up by stating, on camera; "They are making it sound like we did this all for show." The every brilliant Blitzer, male Lois Lane of our time, managed to clip the sentence in half, and followed up: "What do you mean by the statement 'we did this for show?'" The child did not answer. That Wolf had cut off the first part of the quote blew right by the rest of the media. The part excised by Wolf became the quote itself, in typical media tradition. That part of the quote is isolated and delivered as the entire quote on The Drudge Report and CNN's home internet site right this minute. That the first part of the actual quote changes the meaning of the sentence entirely is overlooked, not to mention the boy's very accurate observation and portrayal of what the media is up to.
The rather adventurous life the Heene is having has been taken apart by this same media. What a wonderful family the Heene family seems, if you look at it from the perspective of being a child. The children have a loving brilliant father and caring mother. The children go on all sorts of adventures. They are having the time of their lives and being cared for as well. What child would not want to be a part of that family? But the media is changing the adventure into danger. And the Heene parents are being portrayed as whacked-out hippy losers putting their children in danger. That the family is trying to make it, using 'branding,' YouTube, and all the instruments necessary to get noticed in this culture, is being turned against them.
The media created a huge story out of nothing at all. A helium balloon that had flown free. That was all that happened. By the time that media got done with it, and realizing that they might be held accountable for blowing the whole thing way out of proportion, Wolf Blitzer, and company, turned on the Heene family and decided to portray them as attention grabbing scammers. This is what is happening because of media.
It is happening every day. We are being given unimportant idiocy to consider. We are being given celebrity after celebrity across our television screens. We are being kept from substance and reality by creative lying and obfuscation, and its being done to us on purpose.
On page one of the business section of today's New York Times, half way down, you will find an article titled "Bill Shields Most Banks From Review." The House Financial Services Committee approved an exemption for 8000 of our nation's 8200 banks, that will allow them to remain exempt from having to be examined for oversight by the new banking agency for oversight created by the same bill! That article is buried in the business section of the paper. The front page of the Times today? Yes, you guessed it, the 'Balloon Boy' story is page one! How could the awful outrage of all those banks being exempted from oversight, after what we have all experienced happening in that industry recently, be allowed to happen? How is it that the public is not outraged, protesting and even rioting? it is because the public does not know. The New York Times has only about a million readers, even if the banking story ran on page one it would get little notice. Wolf Blitzer does not care what happens to us, and neither does CNN. They are making millions on 'Balloon Boy' stories, then blaming the idiocy of those stories on anyone who happens to be handy. Vulnerable and handy is even better.
These bankers, with their media cronies, are a long way from being done with us. We are not being bled by the financial services industry to the point where we will be weak and careening. We are already that. No, we are being bled until we are, quite literally, dead. And we are going to go to our grave willingly, trying to catch a last glimpse of some runaway helium balloon....
Things are pretty dire. Have you noticed? The economy continues (totally) in the toilet, with respect to home values, jobs, banking, credit and just about everything else except gas prices and road repairs. We are doing nothing about the Peak Oil Problem we see coming at us like one of those old fashioned train wrecks. The world climate situation is huge, seemingly unavoidable and extremely unsettling. And what are we doing about all of that? We are watching television. And waiting. And then watching some more television. We are listening to the likes of self-described geniuses who are about as bright as those idiotic children behind the counter at Apple stores. Ben Stein, a flat-voiced and flat-brained comedian. Bill Bennett, fat-mouthed and flabby example of a Complete American Wastrel. Every once and awhile we get a paid-off and quieted Paul Krugman and whatever peaceful creature Maureen Dowd has become.
Our leadership seems lost amongst the chaos of Congress and the Courts. We are wandering around the world, blundering from one continent to another, one country after another without a mission.
Well, here is the mission. It is time.
1. We have to fund and then build the National Ignition Facility right now. Like yesterday. Only fusion power will be at the core of our resurgence. Only fusion power can give us the kind of control of the universe that we have to have to save ourselves and then get out there to begin our conquest of the galaxy. Sounds totally whacked, does it not? Especially in light of what is going on today. Forget trillions for defense, or for propping up banks or even health care. We are not going to need any of those things unless we get more control over this planet and ourselves. And fusion gives us the energy to do just that. It is the only thing that can do it. And we are ready to do it right this minute!
2. We have to go back to space. Right now. It is from out there that we must use the tools of observation and operations to impact the planet. Yes, the Moon and Mars and more space stations. A lot of them. We also need this for our spirit. We were never meant to survive without adventure. We thrive on it and we have nowhere to gain it anymore except in idiotic insane wars that tear us apart.
3. Tesla, yeah that whacked out genius of a hundred years ago, was right. About AC electricity, of course, but also about the provision of electricity. With our new fusion we make it free. That is right. All homes in this country (of reasonable size) get free electricity. That is heat in the winter and cooling in the summer. All. And we have plugs for our electric cars. We have already paid for the electricity many times over. We developed the damn stuff, then had it taken away. Tesla was right. Westinghouse was an asshole and a thief.
4. Along with that home comes a medical guarantee of care, as well as unemployment coverage (for like three years) and disability coverage. All Americans. We can do this if we simply turn on the thieves, butdon't forget we'll need them. We need them and a lot of our criminals (currently, and stupidly, contained in all of these prisons across the land) to build our missiles and spaceships. Yeah, everyone gets a job. We can leave our violent criminals inside and even maybe build some special care centers again for our mentally ill. And don't forget those guys and gals down in Dixie. We need them too. They build kick-ass space gear and we need people who know how to use guns, as well.
5. We build some real transportation. That nutty idiot Lyndon LaRouche only had two things right. Fusion (maybe his support of it in the sixties hurt us more than we know, because he was such a nut) and a Bridge or Tunnel across the Bering Straits into Russia. We need our Railroads back, big time, to carry all this gear. And we need the help of our brothers and sisters. The Mexicans and the Canadians. We need to get rid of all these stupid border restrictions. On both borders. We cross freely to work and live, if we care to. Americans get special privileges for living here as citizens (how about a house, electricity, et al?). We need these folks as this is going to be one prodigious effort to save the planet and become what we are meant to be. And those Russians too. They are a tremendous culture, if you get out of the dumb Moscow mindset group. Screw Putin. He's nothing, once we make our mind up. Lead, follow or get out of the way. Imagine high speed rail to anyplace in the world!
6. We build the eighth and ninth fleets. Whole fleets of combat carrier and support ships. But we do not arm them. We send them out to help people, fully staffed with medical, food, energy, all of it. We can call the carriers the Mother Theresa and the Albert Sweitzer instead of the bellicose leaders names we are currently stuck with. Think about how much good these two nuclear forces could do to help people. The tsunami situation. New Orleans. And we could staff it with all paid volunteers. Guys and gals back from Iraq or even Vietnam, in need of redemption or just a great feeling job! And this world would love us. And they'd be right to do so.
7. Forget about the current wars. There are none if we do not wage them. So we lost the war with Al-Quida, or whoever the hell they really are. Or we won it. You can't fight a war against an idea or concept unless you just want to stay at war forever. Forget it. Come home. Just let idiots who pull off stuff like 911 know that we are going to blow off the head of anyone we find doing junk like that. And this time we'll look for them instead of use them to do things our rotten leadership could not have done without them. Screw Iran and North Korea. We do not need them. If we hear from them again we'll glad blow them, continuously, into the stone age, nuclear or otherwise. Nobody is bringing a nuke into the U.S. Not anymore. But we are not telling anybody we can detect them. All of them. Why not? Because we are lost in our stupid set of secrecy rules that only keep things secret from the American Public! That keeps you, that public, from making any changes to the rules that need to be changed or we are all going to die awful deaths, or maybe just our children!!!
8. Stop outsourcing. It did not work. We get no service at all and the products suck. We all know that, but have been conditioned to buy them. Walmart has to change or go away. Just the facts of life. And you have to make them. Or you can die poor in a poisoned environment. In source carefully from here on. The employers are the keys. They must be controlled by laws on who they can hire. We do not need national I.D. cards for citizens, but we need them for all outsiders visiting, and we need to know where those people are on a regular basis. This is not rocket science. It is just wisdom.
9. Get must educators back on television. Whatever we have to do we must do here with this television nightmare that is helping deaden and kill us. I know, I write for it. These idiot pundits must go. They need to be replaced by real historians and real credentialed people. The Rush Limbaughs, and former sportscasters, and other complete idiots need to be retired post haste. And we need to get control of the companies that control these network and cable outlets. It does not matter if this infringes on the press for a bit. We are all going to die miserably if we do not. What is the choice? We do not have freedom of the press anymore. We have freedom of corporate expression. So we change it. We go in and commit surgery. If we have to commit surgery on our morally destitute Congress and crypto-right Supreme Court, then we do it. Our life is at stake. Dangerous times, yes, as this system has gotten us this far. We do not need to lose it, but we need to modify what is going on within it.
10. We have lost all of our small information sources. And most of those were independent. We did have some freedom of the press. We still do, out here on the internet (which television is trying to change by using internet porn and child molesters as their straw enemies). But we have lost all our small newspapers across the country. They now only do ads. The ethnic papers are gone too. Here, on the internet, it is very very difficult to get a 'voice' no matter what you do. Maybe fifty people will read this blog and I have been blogging pretty consistently for almost three years. Big money sweeps in here too (like Drudge and Huffington) and just takes over viewership. And you can burn up all your time on the internet, just trying to build a following. Most of us have to make a living. We need to do something to bring back our information delivery systems. We have been deliberately denied any way to communicate with one another in meaningful ways. We can only build a movement to do something through the existent structure and look what happened in this last election! Nothing! And I like Obama! I am writing this blog (initially) on his site!
We can do all this if we will. If a message such as this can go out, be evaluated, and then acted upon. The ten things I list are very pro-active, very aggressive, and very timely and doable. If we will. We can do this. We have the mythology that will allow us to reach down and then do something stupendous. We are the only culture on the planet that can. Because this is America.
http://www.themastodosn.com
What is happening with our economy is almost wholly the fault of our banking establishment. Yes, there are other factors which have made a tremendous impact; outsourcing jobs and factories, insourcing labor that sends most of its money elsewhere, inattention to long range projects in the areas of space and science, but the major blame for this continuing debacle rests with our system of banking. I say system because, as with our energy related industries, the banks have slowly pulled everything together into a net of monopoly. Interest rates are basically the same no matter what bank you go to. Fees are the same. Charges are the same. And local service, just as we saw happen in the filling station part of the energy monopoly, has all but dried up. No local bank manager will confess to any fault at all. All decisions are made by some obscure unreachable home office committee. How convenient. How deliberately convenient.
There are some things that Americans do not really understand about this banking system which has developed. The most important fact that blows right by almost all of us is that banks are constantly doing business with one another. The flow. When you sell a house, for example, and get the money from the sale, you get it from one bank and it goes right into another bank. You do not keep the cash. In fact, you are told that it is foolish to cash the check and keep the money yourself at home. Security is mentioned, along with not making any money on your money. You get your paycheck and cash it. But you don't cash it. You put it into another bank. Once you begin to understand this 'flow' of money among all the banks some things begin to stick out. One of them is about that cash. My father, who is wealthy, went into his little Wisconsin bank, where he has been a major depositor for many many years, and asked to withdraw fifty thousand dollars in cash from his checking account (balance; several hundred thousand). He wanted to withdraw cash because I told him (brashly) that they wouldn't give it to him. He got scared, so he went in. Being my Dad, he also wanted to prove me wrong.
He came out of that bank a different man. The bank promised to give him the cash within five days. They indicated that they were just too small to keep that kind of cash on hand. Since I had told my Dad that that is what the banker would say, he went right at the man. To no avail. You see, I had told my Dad that the man would lie. Of course the bank had fifty thousand dollars in cash on hand, at the very least. But they would not give it to a depositor because they didn't have to, and also because they wanted to buffer such decisions with time. Also, Dad was shocked to have the banker ask him what he wanted the money for. I had predicted that question, as well. Dad got his money the next day. He phoned me about what had happened, which surprised me, but Dad was that scared. I had him go to the bank's main branch, walk up to the Chief Executive Banker and threaten to buy the bank (he has that kind of money), and then fire each and every member of management. They gave him his cash. If you don't believe this story, go to your own branch and ask for a lot of cash!
Since the banks are just flowing the money around and around, from one bank to another, there does not have to be money. Only small amounts of the real stuff are necessary to meet demands like my Dad's. The rest of the 'money' is all paper promises. And that has helped lead us into this nightmare. Once we left the gold standard in 1971 (under that cretin Nixon) the paper promises made by the banks did not have to be backed by anything other than their word. And we have recently (again!) discovered just how worthless the word of bankers can be.
Bankers are supposed to make money by taking in deposits, accounting for them, and then loaning out the deposited money at a higher rate of return (saving account deposit pays about 2% today, while home loans run about 6%, and a car loans about 8%). Not much difference between returns on deposited money and loaned out money today. And that is a tip-off as to how banks are really making their money. They are making money from charges and fees. Overdraft charges run about 35.00 per overdraft. And the invention of the ATM card has changed everything. We used to use checks, but now checks only amount to less than ten per cent of consumer financial transactions. The banks have figured out how to manipulated ATM card balances. They credit deposits differently than withdrawals. That is their major tool. If they can get your balance down below the level of an ATM charge, which they go ahead and allow you to make even though their system tells them that you don't have sufficient money in the bank to cover the charge, then they can hit you for 35.00 bucks. If you are at the shopping center, using your card, and the card keeps working, you can see where one day's use might land you. You use the card five or six times, charge less than a hundred bucks, but get hit with hundreds of dollars worth of 'overdraft' charges. Clever. You see, the check you had deposited to cover all this, which you assumed was in the account because (after all) your card worked fine, was not to be credited until the next day. Very clever and very deliberate action on the part of your wonderful home grown bank.
And it goes on and on. The banks own the credit card companies. They have those companies (all based in the Dakotas where the laws are written to keep cardholders from having any chance of winning a court case) that send out the credit card bill timed perfectly so that when you get and pay the bill, even if you pay it the day you get it, your payment is received late. Then you get hit with another 35 buck charge, plus they can retroactively raise the interest rate on your entire balance by ten percent or so, and then raise it on other cards not even associated with the card you paid 'late' on! Forget about the heinous usury charges of PayDay loan places. Your very own bank can charge you a thousand percent, and get away with it, without even the smallest of consumer complaints.
Are you getting it yet? This outright, and quite legal, theft perpetrated by our Dr. Jekyll seeming 'good old boy' bankers is so outrageous that the networks and cable television will not even entertain discussing it. The media is not afraid of riots or the shredding of bank executive lives. Nope. The networks and cable television broadcasters are owned by the same bank system, in different variations, that is screwing the public to death.
How about this new set of banking regulations which the Federal Reserve is right now undertaking, in order to prevent another 'meltdown,' as we supposedly saw a year ago? Front page of the New York Times on Saturday. Upper right column. Go back and read it. Whatever regulations they enact will remain confidential, in order to guard the privacy of the banking system, and whatever supervision of the new regulations, should their be any, will be confidential as well. How does stuff like that make it into a major news publication and raise no ire? No marching on Washington. Nobody at all, except me, crying into this cold harsh night? Krugman, on this very day, did attack the banks, but made certain he would not discuss any of this. He went after the fact that banking executives have not curtailed their practice of paying each other great bonus amounts for short term gains, and then doing nothing when those gains prove to be illusory over time. Krugman, who knows this stuff well, was too cowardly to mention the 'elephant in the living room' part of those short term gain bonuses. And that is this; the bonus money is generated from short term gains that are not real. They are lies on paper, generated for the single purpose of paying out a huge bonus to the thieves that came up with the paper. We have all watched this happen. It has been right out in front of us, time after time. No banking executives have gone to court, trial or prison. You see, it is not illegal. When Bernie Madof was originally cornered he said something very valid: "We are all Ponzi Schemer's in the financial system now." He was right. However, if you have a bank as your cover, then Ponzi Schemes are quite legal. And confidential, as well.
I encourage you to go to your local bank branch and tell anything of this article to that man or woman running the branch. It is probably very close to being the last time you will be able to do it. Pretty soon that person will not speak the language very well anymore (remember the gas stations that used to be?), and gradually (as with credit card acceptance by filling station machines) there will be no need to have anybody at branches for you to say anything to anymore. The guys who wrote the screenplay for the move "The Matrix" were dead-on.
I don't bother with Matt Drudge much. I look at his work like I look at that of Ann Coulter, Charles Krauthammer, or even that Beck fella over on Fox. After watching the Coulter/Maher special a few weeks back, I have a better understanding of these media icons. And phonies. On the Maher special, he and Coulter commiserated with one another about how they really did not believe much in anything of what they presented. In spite of my mileage, I was a bit shocked. These people are all carrion feeders. The more outrageous they can make their message, the more attention they get, and therefore the more money they make. That they are helping our culture slip right into the morass is besides the point to them. They have truly allowed themselves, or quite possibly formed themselves, into cultural slime.
Matt Drudge ran a headline this day that was an outrage. The headline to his online rag was "Michelle Obama wears Bondage Belt." You see, Michelle, our First Lady, wore a slotted black leather belt she had just acquired. A follow on article to the Bondage crap was about how big a carbon footprint her recent purchases left behind her. Yes, this is a Republican piece of garbage online newspaper that is holding the President's wife up as an abuser of the economy, not to mention associated with certain sexual deviants of the social order.
What can be said of such things? Can you imagine the goose-stepping clowns of the Bush administration standing for such treatment of the former First Lady? As much as she resembled a female version of Gumby, nobody commented. Certainly nothing was said that associated that woman with any sexual performance...whatever. But then, maybe it is repressed sexuality that drives the Republican Party political machine. Certainly it cannot be a dedicated plan to return this country to economic sanity. That is not in their 'carbon foot-printed' game plan.
Jimmy Carter comes out and indicates that a lot of nasty criticism of Obama is because he is Black. And the Republicans deny that, of course. Prejudice is never delivered straight across the table. It is always cloaked. I met a young soldier in Hawaii who referred to President Obama as President Osama. I let it go twice. The third time, I counseled with him. I told him that I was entitled to say such a thing, as a private citizen, but he was not. The President is his Commander in Chief. I offered to allow him to remain in the Army if he would mend his ways. He accepted, of course, as I was not kidding and he somehow knew that (his wife was there, right next to him at the bar, and elbowing the hell out of him). Once he accepted my kind offer to remain an E-4 I asked him where he was from...already having guessed the answer. He was from South Carolina. I confronted him about the possibility that his negative view of President Obama was because of race. He denied that, so I asked him what preferable job a man like Obama might be allowed to hold if he was not the president. He gave himself away with his answer: "If that man wasn't president he'd be unemployed, living off his wife or the state, like the rest of them."
I had no answer for that. I cannot transplant spines into men who lack them. I cannot inject brains into craniums that were birthed without them. And I cannot do anything with an E-4 lout raised in the refined prejudice still found all over the American South.
Hell, I am mad at Obama too. We are still in Iraq. We are still in Afghanistan. We are renewing the rotten Patriot Act Provisions which stole our freedoms. We are not going after the torturers. We are not throwing that admitted felon Dick Cheney into any kind of prison. And we are all caught up about the issue of healthcare, a problem that rises only to the trillion dollar level, when we have a forty trillion dollar economic mess taking aim at the country like the dead black bores of a twelve gauge shotgun. And Obama is leading the cheer that we are past that problem. Poppycock.
But Obama is all we've got. He is bright. He is smooth. He is cool as a cucumber. Will he buck the horrid system that has built up since the end of WWII? Will he exercise intellect and heart in his decisions? Will he pull us back from the edge of this ever-approaching cliff, or merely guide us gently over that edge?
I don't know, but I do know that Matt Drudge is a low life classless cretin and deserves to be poor in this oppressively harsh capitalistic heaven we call home. Michelle does not deserve Drudge and neither do we, unless one particular part of him is to be served up on a platter.
The elevator was too slow in descending twenty floors to the tower lobby. Peter Sweeney thought another bad thought about the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. But his complaint about the Otis elevators was secondary to the livid anger he felt about the fifty dollar charge which was going to be levied against him for departing his room two hours after checkout. Paying six hundred dollars a night, per room, and he had three, was no small deal over the course of a week. The writer's convention had been a wonderful success, but that did little to lesson his anger. The doors opened and he hit the lobby, walking fast to where the concierge desk was located. An ebullient Japanese woman was on duty. She was a terribly cute butterball of a little thing, who Sweeney liked, but that did not deter him.
"They're charging me a fifty dollar late checkout fee for staying in my room until my flight's ready on Tuesday," he began. The woman, who's name tag read Malani, looked up from her sitting position across the desk with wide open eyes of surprise. "This is not fair and I want that charge waived!" Sweeney demanded, his uncommon emotion causing the young woman to blink and nod her head in agreement.
"I will call the management," she declared, reaching for the telephone. "i will speak to my manager, and even his manager, if necessary. I will get the charge waived. I completely agree and apologize. You are a very valuable guest and I will get this changed."
Sweeney deflated. He had nothing more to add, so he turned abruptly and went back to the elevators. Up in his room he changed into his best aloha shirt and long pants. He was to keynote the conference in half an hour. He rolled ideas around in his mind on how to begin his hour long talk. Nothing came to his mind. Once dressed, and properly adjusted using his full length mirror, he returned to the slow Otis machines. He was calmer on the way down, certain that Malani would take care of the idiotic late charge and put that problem to rest.
This time Peter approached the concierge desk more gently, more like his old affable self. He smiled at Malani. She got up from the desk and came around to meet him. Then she began to cry. Great tears coursed down her beautiful Asian cheeks. Then she began to sob as she talked.
"I could not get the charges waived. My manager said no, so I called his manager, who also said no. He said I would lose my job if I brought up the subject again. I am so very very sorry that I have failed you."
Sweeney stood rooted to the spot, unable to take the scene in fully at first. The woman cried on, tears falling down onto the front of her pink uniform. Unconsciously, he moved forward and hugged the sobbing woman.
"Its okay. Fifty dollars does not mean that much to me. I have plenty of money. I don't know what I was thinking." Slowly he released Malani, then stepped back.
"Really, its okay?" the woman said, her voice husky from crying.
Sweeney nodded, smiling a smile he did not feel. He felt more like crying, but turned to retrace his steps to the elevators instead. The Otis cage did not seem so slow on the way up to floor twenty. Once in his room he sat at the end of his bed to think. The incident effected him deeply. He was not the kind of man who brought hotel staff to tears. He hated such people. What had he done? He stared at the dresser before him. Atop the dresser sat the distinctive box of new Alexandre Dumas pen, made by the Mont Blanc Company. It had cost him eight hundred dollars, and that was on Ebay. He intended to give it to the Pulitzer Prize Winner who would be attending his keynote speech. He hoped to win his way into the man's heart, or at least get his attention.
Peter stood up. He approached the dresser. Then he moved quickly, grabbing the box and heading back to the lobby while checking his watch. He had only ten minutes to get to the Monarch Room to deliver his speech. The elevators seemed running in molasses until opening, once again, at the lobby level. He walked quickly back to the desk where Malani sat. She looked up with a return of trepidation in her expression. But Sweeney smiled, and then held out the box.
"Please accept this gift from me. I do appreciate you, your service, and what you tried to do on my behalf."
Malani arose, stepped around the desk and took the box into both hands. She opened it. A small sound escaped her lips. Then she stared up into Sweeney's eyes with a look of shocked adoration. She closed the box as she bent into a deep bow. Her hands, however, came up with box held up in front of her.
"Thank you," she whispered, "I will live up to the value of this gift."
Sweeney walked away, his heart lifting, the smile on his face turning into a real smile. The crowd applauded as he entered the Monarch Room, his introduction already provided. He took the extended microphone and stepped onto the stage. He looked out over the expectant faces of the new budding authors.
"Thank you," he said, "I will live up to the value of this gift." As he spoke he realized that a small Japanese woman working behind the concierge counter at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel had changed his life.
http://www.themastodons.co
Thomas Corinthian Martin made his way through the throngs of Waikiki tourists, all of whom resembled over weight and badly attired lemmings, drifting through paradise with no purpose, other than the accumulation of more local junk. Oahu. Outside of beaches, bars and crowded surfing holes, not really much to do. And he had his wife with him. The magnificent Mary. Five years of splendid marriage, wild sex and intellectual abandon. It was not supposed to be that way, he knew. Many friends and even family had shared their own tales of marital bliss...or the lack of them. Finding Mary at an obscure Northern Wisconsin college had been an act of wonderful serendipity. They had dated for three years, then married as war loomed. The war had been a singular disaster, and the hospital experience after even worse. But magnificent Mary had made it all worthwhile.
Thomas wandered down Kalakaua, Waikiki's main drag. He walked inside the acre known as the International Marketplace. If you wanted a custom Zippo lighter, or a lousy piece of jade, then the IMP was for you. Otherwise it was a bazaar of push cart 'carnies' all yelling for attention. Huge non-Hawaiian birds cawed loudly everywhere. You could have your picture take with one of them for twenty bucks, and maybe lose an ear.
He made his way back over to the grand entrance to the Moana Hotel. The place was magnificent. Had always been magnificent. Thomas had gone to school at St. Augustine, a Catholic elementary school run by the Maryknolls right down the street. The rebuilt church, which was the cornerstone of the school, remained an icon of meaningful culture isolated among the commercial nightmare of the rest of the strip.
The Maryknolls were gone. Gone to other assignments across the world. There was a convent for some of the nuns on the Windward side of the Island. He'd called and asked if he and his wife could visit. The answer had been a surprising, and warm, affirmative. Visiting the convent would be like going back in time, he had thought. Mary was a Catholic, as well. Her parents were old country Irish Catholic, but raised in Chicago. Visiting the convent would be good material to discuss the next time they were all together. That Thomas was a sort of fractured atheist had not escaped their notice.
The Moana had the rental car ready. Mary was there, in all her radiant beauty. They drove fast. The convertible Mustang only went fast, except when there were traffic backups. But there were none. The convent was austere, not looking like a convent at all when they arrived. It looked like a well maintained storage facility, but it did have a nice front foyer. Thomas seated Mary, then perused the list of nuns in residence. He only recognized one. Sister Gregoria. His dreaded fourth grade teacher. She had been an artist with wood fortified erasers. She could hit a student in the temple at forty feet with unerring accuracy, and she had carried a magazine of them fed up her left sleeve. Her use of the metal edged ruler was also a thing of creative beauty. He looked down at his scarred knuckles, as he pushed the button on the black panel. She would have to do. He smiled over at his wife, again thanking the God he didn't believe in for her existence in his life.
A female voice came out of the panel. Sister Gregoria was on her way. Her arrival was much more expressive than the facility deserved. A woman of about forty, wearing the great black robe of a Maryknoll nun swept around a corner nearby. The woman was radiant and smiling grandly. She extended her right hand as she advanced to meet them. Mary rose up to take it.
"Oh Mary, it is so good to finally meet you," the nun said. Thomas stood next to his wife and stared at the nun stupidly. He had come to see his fourth grade teacher. He had not let anyone know who he was, much less who Mary might be. The nun turned to him. He took her firm warm hand in his own.
"And you, Shadow, what are you doing here?" Thomas was dumbfounded, once more. He had not been called Shadow since his early elementary school days. His brother had been a big deal at the school. Thomas had gone everywhere with him. So he'd been given the nickname of 'Shadow.' His brother's shadow. He shook her hand. He was numb, trying to take it all in.
"Ah, this is my wife," He finally got out.
Sister Gregoria's eyes went back and forth between Mary and Thomas several times. "Extraordinary," she finally said, before sitting down.
"Why did you come?" she said, her voice near that of a whisper.
"I brought Mary to see the place and see if there were any of my old teachers left. How do you know her?" Thomas inquired.
He could not fathom that there was any plausible answer to his question. He had been in the fourth grade with Sister Gregoria. He had not returned to the island during the intervening years. Thomas had met Mary at a small obscure college in Northern Wisconsin. There just was no possibility that Sister Gregoria could know her.
Sister Gregoria sat silently for a full minute, before she spoke.
"That's not why you came here," she said. He just looked at her, not able to think of anything to say to that.
"You came here because of God. Mary is the daughter of my best friend. I went to high school with her mother. Since that time we've corresponded weekly by letters. While you were in fourth grade here, I was writing and receiving letters from her Mother. There is no coincidence that can explain this. This is not a one in a million circumstance. This is God, and He's sending you a message."
"Ah, I, I, ah, don't know what to say," He responded. Mary spoke for him.
"You're Sarah Fogarty, aren't you?" The nun nodded, with a tearful smile.
That he had been attending elementary school taught by the best friend of his future wife's mother, who had been writing letters to one another while he was in those classes, was just too much for him to take in. He could not have gone to that small college and have run into Mary by accident. How could that fit into his carefully constructed system of physics and logic? It could not. There were two thousand colleges in the United States. Thomas could have gone to any number of them. Mary as well. There were two thousand students at the college he did choose, and He could have taken up with over a thousand of other females there. He had met his future wife by accident. She had been the only one, among a table of five young women, who was shorter than he was. So, after asking the others, and having them stand and laugh at him, she danced. The rest is a history of serendipity. At least I had believed that.
Thomas sat down. His life was changed. Sister Gregoria was talking. His wife was talking. But he was thinking. His well grounded, vaunted, and much-buffered belief system in 'no-belief-in-God' was shattered. Sister Sarah was right. Not even the wildest odds maker could calculate the probability of what had happened. the odds were up there with the number of atoms in the whole universe. But what God? And why? And why him? Why Mary? Why Sister Sarah? Why any of it?
Thomas went out into the night, following his return from the Windward side. Sister Gregoria would not leave his mind. The International Market Place beckoned. Maybe he would buy a custom Zippo, even though he didn't smoke, or maybe some fake jade beads. If nothing was real then everything was real in this new world where physics and the sciences only allowed for surface explanations. Reality was cloaked, only small edges occasionally sticking out to cut and dismember comfortable belief systems.
The End.
I don't have any obvious answers. I have only the statement of outrageous serendipity to consider, as I have over the years. I am broken by God. Not to be fixed. I am lost in a vortex of swirling reality mixed with winds and currents I understand not at all. I am worse than a lousy Catholic. I am everything about the wavering doubting-Thomases whom the God of the Bible would vomit from his mouth and Kingdom. But then, although I cannot but believe in God (He made sure of that) I can't find any organized collection of men and women who believe in what this God has to be, that I can make sense of or get along with. And this God is one wild creature indeed. I don't believe He can be contained, or well described, by the documents of the Bible, purported to be His word. And so I run alone, in single harness, unaware of where I am going or what I am taking along with me.
Sister Gregoria (Sarah Fogarty) died today. Like Kennedy. With Kennedy. I look like Kennedy. I used to have to sign autographs for Japanese tourists in Hawaii, I look so much like him. What the hell does that mean? What does any of this mean? I am broken by God.
If you were to attend Explosive Ordinance Disposal School you would find out a lot of strange stuff about explosives. If you studied these substances long enough you would come to find that the effects they create are not dissimilar from the effects created in our social order. For example, and as to their very nature, explosives don't really 'explode,' as we seem to observe. A high yield explosive (or low yield, for that matter) is just a fire. A really fast fire. At EOD school they drive this into the students using graphic demonstrations. The demonstration for the 'fast fire' nature of explosives was as follows: They took five miles of detonation cord (a think rope-looking cord of explosives) and ran it back and forth in front of a set of raised stadium seats. The switchbacks of cord went on and on, back and forth, mere inches apart. When they were done, they put all of us students in the bleachers, then hooked up some sort of electrical detonator to one end of the five mile cord. You see, Det Cord, as it is called, burns at about 18,000 feet per second, which is pretty fast. Five miles of it laid out like that, when detonated, took all of a second-and-a-half to 'explode.' You got to see the 'explosion' start at one end of the cord and then run back and forth all the way to the other end in just under two seconds.. Impressive. Explosives are really fast fires indeed.
Why do I mention this. Our media works the same way. They out there, attempting to start really large fires, all the time. And, like explosives, they have, at the basis of their nature, a lie. Look at the latest potential explosion, with respect to the Pan Am plane that went down from a bomb in Scotland years ago. The only convicted guy to be caught for that was just released in Libya. He received a 'hero's welcome' the media is reporting, with plenty of on location video. The lie is that the media is saying: "Rage and outrage continues to grow over the release of this prisoner, all over Western Civilization." The media is initiating and building that very 'rage' they claim to be only reporting. They are trying to ignite an explosion by igniting one end of the social 'Det Cord.'
And then there is another interesting result when dealing with explosives. It is called sympathetic detonation. When you set a large main charge of explosives you set a small little piece of more volatile explosive next to it. That is called the supplementary charge. Then you set your fuze cord to the supplementary charge. When you pull the fuze igniter the supplementary charge is eventually ignited. That sets off the main charge. The main charge acts in 'sympathy' with the little one.
Our media is doing this all the time. They bring their equipment and attach themselves to what they hope will be a main charge. Then they do an initial report, attempting to instill and build up as much emotion as they possibly can. That is their supplementary charge. After they set this supplementary charge off they call in to their headquarters to gauge the effect. It appears that the Scotland crash is not going to explode in any kind of giant fireball, from their efforts. It appears that health care in America has gone off like a two thousand pounder, however. For that one, national health care, they went around the nation attaching their little supplementary charges to open forum meetings. They got some great explosions. And the main charge may eventually mean that we have to continue with this corrupt and unfair health system we have.
All the explosions the media eventually manages to detonate are bad, by the way. Notice that? Why? Why do only twenty percent of Americans understand that, by population, crime is forty percent less than it was fifteen years ago (the public thinks crime is UP!!)? Why does the public have no clue that the real expenses of medical care are not due entirely to insurance or the lack of it, but certainly due to the skyrocketing prices being charged (up 20% per year!) by your kindly loving doctor, his team, the hospitals and the drug companies? How did the public come to believe that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? How did they come to believe that somehow, through the wildest screwy logic, we are properly at war with the Taliban in Afghanistan? Our country believes in crap and drivel because that is what it has placed in front of it every day of its life now.
Our press is all about bad news. Watch the ten O'clock news tonight. In fact, any night. You will see the lead story (unless Mike Jackson rises from the dead) will be about a local murder. The follow-up will be too, unless there is a notable robbery. Prices and taxes will be up and hopelessly headed ever higher on your news. Politicians of all sorts will also be committing all sorts of theft and adultury, as well.
As long as we are going to compensate the media for telling us the most lurid, horrid and graphically nauseating stuff, they are going to continue to 'report' that to us. They are not going to go out and set their little supplementary charges next to some guy feeding the homeless (for which, in seven states he will be incarcerated for), or being successful in a new business, or even trying out his latest invention. Every once and awhile we get to hear and see about such things. You will note that any such report of wonderful good news is given to us for maybe a twenty second sound byte, now and then (rarely!).
This whole thing will kill us, unless either God steps in or we receive the greatest of good fortune. During the cold war the media set their little supplementary charges right next to some nuclear weapons (which are the mainest of main charges in anyone's book!). The media, in cahoots with our military industrial complex, almost had us in a nuclear war (three times, at least). Only later, when the Soviet Union fell apart, did we discover that the Soviets never had any, read that again, any, intention of launching missiles at us or dropping bombs upon us. And they never had anything like our technology in any area to do it with. The media, for the most part, knew that.
There is no money in good news. Unfortunately, we have discovered only recently, and due to this same toxic explosive media, that societies like to see and hear the bad news every day. For some reason, it makes us feel better about our own situation and life. If things are so bad 'out there' in other people's lives then they don't seem quite so bad in our life or in our backyard.
Do we have it in us to stop this media we have empowered? Do we want to? Or do we just wait, until one of these supplementary charges is attached to a main charge we cannot stop or control? We are playing with fire. Really fast fire.
I'm spending just about all of my time preparing The Bering Sea, so that I'll have a "final product" by the time I get to the convention in Hawaii. Hawaii being home to the Hawaii Writer's Conference, the class of all writer's conferences, and difficult to qualify to attend. I have never gone before, much less as a featured speaker, which I am this year. I was raised on Oahu, just like Obama. I read somewhere today that there is a right wing letter going around about how Obama was not raised in the American culture. I think the idiot neocon who penned the letter, named Len Pritchard (supposedly a former executive of Proctor and Gamble), thinks that, unless you were raised in the South, Texas or Arizona, you did not participate in the 'true and valid' American growing up experience. Hawaii is like apple pie, in reality. All year, with slight variations, it is filled with American tourists from all over the United States. The population of Hawaii, the one's who live there and call themselves 'Kamaina,' are outnumbered by a substantial amount at all times. And then there are the tourists who ebb and flow from all over the rest of the planet.
When I was a kid out there, in high school, I used to bike over to the East-West Center. That place was an adjunct to the brand new University of Hawaii, which was still uncredited, so I could not go to college there. But the East-West Center was a place of wonder. Just a big building where students from all cultures would gather, each and every day. I would go to the main lobby and talk to those people. My subject was cosmology (the study of the origins of the universe) and my credentials established by my ability to play a very mean game of chess. Once I had 'performed' and begun discussions on my favorite subject (I was a serious believer in Einstein's curved universe theory) I would invite the students home. My Mom worked in hair styling all day (which is cosmetology, for you ironic humorists out there) and my Dad was out to sea serving as a Boatswains Mate in the Coast Guard. I would invite the students to our home, where we could enjoy refreshments and discuss anything we wanted to. Many of the foreign students only knew the University and the East West Center, as the indigenous population of Oahu at the time was primarily Oriental (and they do not invite foreigners into their homes readily), so my invitations were quite popular. My parents hated what I did, especially when my Dad came home early once and found the house filled with students from Nigera and Kenya. Dad is from Dallas. Anyway, I loved those formative years, and I loved the wild differential nature of the opinions students from exotic cultures could bring to the events.
Here I am, working on editing The Bering Sea. A novel which is so steeped in foreign thought and culture that it reeks of the East-West Center, although I have never gone back to see the place. Maybe, if my espionage thriller novel is a hit, I will be invited to speak there one day. Now that would be something, indeed, but I won't hold my breath. If I did speak, I would take them back to those earliest days of the center's existence, and laud the open sharing of a staff and student-body which I have never again experienced, as I've passed through the years. I would offer myself up at chess and then wrestle my audience into a fiery debate about the origins of this place we inhabit, which is still as mysterious and ethereal as it was back then.
I don't know what I'm going to say at the conference. But that is nothing new for me. Extemporaneous speaking is what I find to be the most fun, and the most entertaining for my audiences. I cannot help but use great doses of humor, as that is how, for the most part I see the results of the origins of this universe. Laughing audiences are usually pretty good ones, I have found. And I like it a lot too!
So I am working my way back to Hawaii, where I really formed up and began, as anything of the intellect I am this night. And really, I'm not that smart. The great shrink at Great Lakes Naval Training Center, nearby where I live, pinned it down pretty accurately: "You're not that smart, you know. You just have a very good memory and you are terrific at making yourself appear to be very intelligent." He was mad that I had confronted him on some of the dream teachings of his idol (Carl Gustav Jung of Analytical Psychology), and had proven myself pretty damned knowledgeable. But I still think he was accurate in expressing his opinion about me. I mean, I'm not Forrest Gump, but I'm not Einstein either. If Einstein was not known to be dead by everyone, however, I might try to pass myself off....
The Hawaii meeting and trip out there in September is going to be warm. I go back to the Island every year, at least once. It is always a warm visit. I can now ignore the racial and cultural prejudice of the place. I can accept the fact that I am a haole out there (but you daren't call me one to my face, no matter what, unless you're joking). I can immerse myself in the parts of the culture that are so wonderfully different and positive. The music. The food. The smell of the place. And yes, the anti-vanilla makeup of the population. And, no matter what, the special nature of the sand and the singular formula of that sea water will draw and hold me firmly out in the sun.
My favorite producer lost the best friend of his son in a freak accident last week. The boy, and his son, were up in the California mountains and sat down on the cliff edge to view a coming storm. The one boy slipped off the wet rock edge and fell to his death, just like Jimmy Dorrenbacher, my best friend in high school did t on Diamond head. before we were to graduate together. Jimmy and I used to drive the strip along downtown Waikiki playing the radio in his convertible Monza as loud as it would play. "Working my way back to you, babe, with a burning love inside" were the lyrics to a Four Seasons song we loved at the time. And the words have never meant more to me in my life, as I work my way back, again.
A few days ago I heard a woman say something with great emotion. Real emotion, quietly and forcefully delivered. It took me a while to place the expression, as I had heard it before, under almost the exact same circumstance, but in a place so removed from my current reality that the bottom of Alice's rabbit hole would be more familiar. The woman said "I want to live again." The woman has cancer. Terrible, stage IV, cannibalizing cancer that is as terminal as such things get. I did not feel very much in listening to the words, and I was outwardly uneffected by the deep emotion that drove the expression from her lips. The words played over me, however, again and again, like occasional waves of icy water sweeping over a low concrete pier. And I am effected. Down here, in my well of souls, where I really live.
I have heard those five words before, and they were delivered to me in the same awful tone of pain and justice denied. Vietnam. I was a company commander there. One of the many responsibilities I had was to see to the last moments of Marines dying under my command. Choppers did not come in until dawn during those early years of helicopter medivac technology. My wounded-in-the-night boys, who could not make it to the dawn 'dust-off' spent there last few minutes with me. The only technology we had to ease their passing was called morphine. They waited, after getting the injections, and I waited with them. And they spoke. They spoke of home. They spoke of pain. But almost all said those five words "I want to live again" before they passed.
I don't speak of those days, those many hours, or about all those boys very much. The material does not seem to lend itself to 'war-story' fashioning of any sort. And, as the years have gone by, I have come to respect those boys memory by not making them a feature of my writing, unless it be here, where names and identities do not appear.
The woman who is dying does not deserve to die either. Her case is not quite as critically poignant because she is not as young as the kids who went into the night over there. She has been around for awhile. But she is still going early, and her years here have been years of great goodness, kindness and thoughtful compassion. And she does not want to go. That none of us do is no consolation to her whatever. That some of us don't want to hang on as badly as she does would never even occur to her. My own wounds, several times, took me to the very edge of that black abyss. I looked over. I even felt like I went over once. And it did not seem so bad at all. The intervening years have never allowed that feeling to leave me. And that feeling has kept me warm on many a cold night. I would give that feeling to this woman but that is not possible, and I know it. There is no way to verbally guide a person through her situation.
This wonderful woman is going to walk through that proverbial valley one day soon. There is comfort inside me, as, even with my twisted belief system about such things, I think that she will be joining some really great kids who went through there so many years before.
I keep thinking about the movie I saw recently regarding Julia Child. Julia Child was a 'regular' woman. A bit too tall, too broad, too heavy and filled with way too much hilarious intellectual insight. She would never get a television show again, and I don't care how great a cook she was. We are well into the 'pretty woman' culture, which has been served up to us by Hollywood and the mainstream media. We get Kelly Rippa, and her 'right in your face' sexual presentation. She is another human twig, trotted out as an example of what women should be, in order to appear attractive at a distance. That she is unhealthy in her thinness is never even discussed, except in rare tabloids. In other shows, and in movies, we get the same thing. five foot eight women who weigh a hundred pounds or less. They, of course, also serve in very macho roles. They kick butt on all manner of men, in spite of the obvious fact that they would break like twigs if ever faced with a real man in a real physical situation, and I don't care how much study and practice might be honed into the woman using martial arts techniques. the marital arts are subject to physics like everything else.
The internet is not helping either. Internet porn is about forty percent of the traffic out here I have read. The women who are used in the videos and still photos are all the same. They all look like Kelly Rippa in some way or another. How are real women to compete with these sick miniaturized Amazons? How is our species to continue, at least in this culture, if men find regular women unattractive? And how can regular women be treated with respect if they have to stack themselves up against the caricatures presented in all forms of this pervasive media? Hence the latest attacks on women's rights. These attacks are shunted off into the area of reborn Christian revival, but in reality, they are all over the place. Just like many of these protests about health care, which are not protests against health care at all, but attacks against Obama (in particular, about the race of Obama), attacks on Roe v. Wade are attacks against women. They have little to do with the life of the unborn. Any more than the health 'opponents' really care about health care. Look at the makeup of the audiences of those town hall meetings. Almost all the people there are well past the age where they depend upon private medical care at all. They are on medicare. So why are they at the meetings? One might think it is because fears have been built up about the aged losing their benefits because of the coming national plan. But that is not true at all. The old people are not really worried about that. No, they want that black guy out of the White House. And they are supported by armed idiots carrying assault rifles all around them. Why we do not have a national law that reads "no guns are to be carried or possessed by citizens within one mile of the president, unless he is just passing through the neighborhood," I have not a clue.
But back to women. Have you noticed that all the new newscasters coming aboard are lovely young women? Almost one and all. Older men are titillated. And what can anybody really say, without it seeming that the complainer is prejudiced against women having these high paying jobs with such grand visibility (at substantially lower wages than their male co-anchors, I might add)? But the move is more of the same we are having pushed at us. The women are all cut from the same cookie cutter template. Thin. Young. Beautiful. Examples of how all women should be. Without that ever being said.
I want regular women back on television and in the movies. I want people like Julia Child. I want women that I can look up to because they are smart and verbally adroit. I want to observe and think of women with intellect and style. I am sick of Hollywood plastic. Sick of flat foreheads with not a single line. Sick of bust lines that are just idiotic. The creatures of Hollywood are abnormal, unhealthy and do a disservice to all women in this country. And I am sick of them being shoved in front of me at every opportunity to be held up as some sort of goal for all to emulate.
It reminds me of what has happened to us with sports stardom. Bret Favre. Tiger Woods. And all the rest of our professional 'sports' players. They are among the highest paid beings on this planet and what do they do? They move a ball, whatever kind of ball, up and down a measured piece of turf in some controlled way. They have been doing that, and only that, all of their lives, since they were small children. They are nothing else. They are ball controllers and movers. And our culture goes nuts over them. They are our people of courage, our people of worth, integrity and honor. Which they are anything but. But the truth does not matter. There they are, with all that money and power, and the bully pulpit anytime they want to stand up and take hold of it.
Our culture is frozen in time. We have run into a barrier we could never have conceived of. We have run into the monster of creation we invented to entertain us, but which now is slowly and inexorably forcing us to accept mythology over science, lies above truth, and scripted fiction over reality. We are fast becoming a culture of entertainment where the word 'work' is applied to others, located just outside (having come up from Mexico) or much further away (think India and China). And the results of this rapid glacial shift are coming in. This economy is not coming back. Got that? It will only come back when the engine of work, reality and results that built it is restarted, and then run with renewed vigor at high rpm.
It was a common day. The Republicans gathered at community get-togethers to make sure everyone does not have a fair shake in this culture. Right now it is all about medical care. Like a country so rich and powerful that it can conduct two full scale wars at the same time while still bailing out some truly evil investment firms to the tune of seven trillion dollars cannot take care of the health of its citizenry. Please! And, oh yeah, lets get to those wild community sharing events armed to the teeth, as if there is anybody attending them that is dangerous or deranged, except for the armed idiots. But that just made it an average day in my Republic. Bret Favre continues to add his aging zest to the weirdness of professional football (he didn’t want to go to training camp, he’s too important for that kids stuff, so he waited til it was over to sign with Minnesota). Average stuff. The wind blows, the grass grows and the sun shines.
But I went to see the Julia Child movie. And I was quite surprised. I am in the entertainment business but had not been to a real theater for a few years. The first ten minutes was all ads. Bad, loud, blaring and rotten television ads transplanted into the theater. You cannot mute them, turn down the sound or anything. I looked around to see if anybody else was mildly disturbed, but nobody was. I realized that I was the only one who was out of sync. No wonder movie attendance is down. And then there was the other new thing, at least at the theater I went to, where the ticket has to be purchased from the same person who gets cokes and drinks, or whatever. You wait forever, just to get in. Which I almost did not, simply because of that. Movies are not dying, they are being killed off by idiotic businessmen who have no clue about humanity.
The movie itself was one neatly wrapped and pleasing chick-flick. Most of the chick-flick part was illustrated by the just wonderful men in the show. The husbands were all true, loving and totally supporting, no matter what. If there was a problem, well, it was resolved in no time at all. No drugs, no booze problems, other women or any of that. Nice and comforting, if not a long long way from any reality. I liked the blogging part of the movie. Of course, our heroine (not Julia, but the other one named Julie) rises in mere days to have hundreds of thousand of followers on Salon.com with her blog. Now that part was totally hilarious (most of the millions of blogs out here have less than five followers!), but it was passed off pleasingly enough. There were some really good shots at the publishing business. Those people, back in Julia’s time and in our’s, will steal the fillings out of your teeth, given any opportunity or sometimes simply out of some deeply driven need to torment. I liked those parts. A little truth in the vanilla pudding which swirled around most of the rest of the feature. But I liked it anyway. I laughed and loved Julia Child (in this case Meryl Streep, who I love almost as much) all over again.
I liked Julie’s blogs because they, the one’s they created for the movie anyway, were so nice and emotive. I don’t think I am capable of that kind of lightness of being. The blogs of that young woman were of gossamer cotton candy while mine are laden with acid and razor blades. But what can I do? Proceed on, hoping that I will be discovered too. That last sentence was a joke, as I have been discovered, and its not all so very good (I am missing some fillings).
http://www.jamesstrauss.com
Prologue
Joshua Boatwright sat patiently, sipping from his small espresso cup, unsure of how he had come to be where he was, tucked into the back corner lobby of the Sheraton hotel in Crystal City. He looked out a floor-to-ceiling window onto a well kept courtyard. No, it was not his place to be there. Analysis was what he did, not personal liaisons. His calling in life was to assemble the smallest shards of data and form sweeping mosaics of truth, in a world filled with lies. Joshua was proud of his nickname, "Tevie," a shortened version of the motto he lived by. "Triple Verfification" was that motto. Three sources to establish the veracity of each shard of data he added to his mosaics, to produce pictures of sanity in an insane world. His team of analysts, located four miles away, at CIA's Langley complex, had not conferred the nickname because of his work, however. Unknown to Joshua, they had given him the name because of their knowledge of his only recreation, which was watching television non-stop when not at the intelligence facility.
Diminutive and fidgeting, he sipped and fretted over the tops of his prescription glasses. They had jet black frames, for affect. He did not need them to read or drive. But they gave him a distinguished look, or so his ex-wife had told him, and they did help when examining the tiniest detail of photo intelligence. The Agency's electronic surveillance, although not legally allowable for personal use, such as tracking one's spouse, had proven ruthlessly effective, just after she'd commented on his spectacles.
A big man entered the lobby near its grand entrance. He wore an expensive blue suit. Its Italian cut did nothing, however, to disguise his morbid obesity. Joshua flicked his eyes towards the man, then grimaced. The man's florid complexion, bulbous nose and polished smile gave his identity away. The Senior Senator from Iowa stopped in the center of the large foyer, to take the place in. No assistants or attendants of any sort accompanied him, which did not surprise Joshua at all. The Senator noticed him sitting alone in the corner. Joshua glanced at him before looking down at a folder he had placed very exactly on his table. Noticing a slight tremor pass through his left wrist, he quickly tucked it down between his thigh and the arm of the chair. Never had he encountered anyone as an Agency representative, and certainly never a sitting senator, much less one who chaired the Senate Appropriations Committee.
"There's no shame to having a little bit of fear here," he whispered inaudibly to himself, breathing deeply inward as he heard the powerful senator's approaching footsteps. Joshua squared his shoulders imperceptibly, his back ramrod straight. He had the weight and reputation of the entire Central Intelligence Agency behind him. He would neither genuflect nor grovel before anyone.
"You'd be their man?" the senator inquired very calmly, stopping astride Joshua's chair. Joshua started to rise and raise his right hand. He quickly caught himself, however, putting it down and reseating himself. He was not there, at a clandestine meeting, to be social, or to even appear social.
"Stay seated," the senator said, paternalistically, his voice soft and silky. He lowered himself with visible difficulty into the narrow chair Joshua had purposely placed at right angles to his own before a low coffee table.
"Got something for me?" the senator asked into the silence between them. His tone this time flavored with a likability that the analyst instantly hated.
Before any reply could be made, the senator picked up an unmarked but highly classified file Joshua had placed on the table. Neither man said anything while he read its contents. Joshua noted that the lobby was completely empty, save for two clerks working registration near the entrance. The waiter, who had brought his expresso to him had never returned. Joshua hoped he wouldn't, for fear of having to touch the cup and allow the senator to see him shaking. Minutes passed. A bead of perspiration ran down his hairline behind his right ear. Fortunately, it was the ear opposite the senator's position.
"Says here that you boys are gonna go ahead and help me out," the big man in the blue suit intoned, before plopping the file back on the table.
"The usual Agency drivel," the senator commented, acidly.
"You gonna tell me what the plan is?" he inquired.
Joshua cleared his throat to steady himself, then followed his instructions.
"Your nephew is being justifiably imprisoned by a foreign government. His violations, meriting that imprisonment, are in keeping with what we normally associate with serious criminal behavior in our own country. The Agency does not normally involve itself in such matters, particularly where such deviant and anti-social behavior is involved." Joshua halted, having delivered his own righteous version of the background information he had been given during his briefing. After a few seconds of silence he realized that something was amiss. Without looking over, he felt the heat of tremendous anger flow toward him from the direction of the senator's chair. Instinctively, he dropped his left shoulder a millimeter or two in defense, before he caught himself.
"Just cut to the chase son. Don't make me come after your career." The senator's threat was issued in a low tone, more akin to that of an oversized cat purring than of a human voice. Joshua's throat froze, a tendril of fear coursing through him at the mention of his career. He finally cleared it by swallowing several times.
"We're sending our best man," Joshua gasped. "He's resourceful, violently equipped and experienced. No expense will be spared in this operation. But we're sending him in alone. We can't afford, no matter what measures you may or may not take, to have this operation rise to the level of an international incident. Not now." Joshua averted his gaze from the direction of the man from Capitol Hill as he finished his memorized message. He waited for a response, again trying to fathom why he had been selected for the role he was playing. He was in the dark, but Joshua sensed the reason. It was about the fact that his analysis group had provided the data which sanctioned the mess-of-a-mission the so-called 'best man' had pulled off, against all odds.
He heard the senator arise from his chair. He looked up, but the man was already walking away, his manufactured smile once more plastered to his politician's face. He had made no comment at all, not even in dismissal.
Joshua's shoulders pressed inward, and his head sank to the point that his jaw nearly touched his chest. His trembling fingers grasped the espresso cup handle. He took a shaky sip. He thought of the 'best man' the Agency was dispatching, then smiled weakly for the first time that day. That 'best man' had just come out of West Africa under the bloodiest of circumstances, having improbably accomplished his mission. The skewed manner in which his mission had been conducted would no doubt have the Agency looking like a stone cold, heartless and uncaring beast, and no one in analysis was taking that lightly. His grip steadied as he pondered over what he'd just done. He'd sent a low-life field agent off to save a drug-dealing nephew of a corrupt scumbag senator. This time not the remotest possibility of the mission's success existed.
Joshua Boatwright stood up straight, tucked the classified folder under his arm and strode across the lobby. His mind was already lost in formulation of the final mosaic, as it would appear, when the details of an illegal and doomed mission crossed his desk.
I work at this essay, writing from my heart, dealing from my brain, and taking everything I can find from all life experience around me. I listen, repeatedly, to the song that played on the Colbert Report only moments ago, and the words course through me over and over again. "When the night has come, and the land is dark, and the moon is the only light we'll see....no, I won't be afraid, no, I won't shed a tear, just as long as you stand by me..." I don't know what motivated Colbert to end his show with this tune, renditioned by Grandpa Elliot...one of those guys found on the streets of some Amercian City by the outfit that made 'Playing for Change,' sometime back. I don't care what motivated Colbert. The message is so vital and timely, and it is not coming from anywhere else.
The words of the song. The heartfelt meaningful way they are delivered. The message so poignantly driven deep into us, who listen and hear. There is real earthy philosophy in this powerful song. There is life and a future of hope and understanding. The message is us. Not me. Not you. But us. We must stand together. Whites, Blacks, Indians, Illegals, rich and poor. We must 'stand by me' if we are to advance what we know we are, and can be. We cannot do it alone, and we cannot do it by attacking one another over this deep chasm which has split this country down the middle. It is as if we are fighting to revisit and repair the same issues our Civil War was fought over. Economic slavery. Racial injustice. Exclusionary privilege. The Confederacy is back with a vengeance and, mostly, located just where it was before.
So, I am asking you to stand by me. All you will get in return is my own participation. I will stand by you. And together, denying no one who wants to stand by us, we will step into this future. We can do it spitting and arguing and carrying on all over the place, but we can do it. We cannot do what we have been doing for the last ten years, or so. We have been going nowhere except backwards. Our technology is in tatters, our economy in shambles, our manufacturing base nearly non-existent. We are surviving on a hope for the present, with no hope for a future. We are nearly to the point where we, of my generation, are waiting to die so that our problems will be over.
Stand by me, the moon is the only light we need....together.
