P Deutermann - The Moonpool

I ordered Scotch and was enjoying my drink as much as I could having just been dumped by the prettiest woman I knew. A polite, even complimentary dumping, but still. Then Ari’s assistant, the lovely Samantha Young, came through the door. This time the giggling really stopped, and was replaced by some frustrated stares from the Southport debutante conga line huddled over their exotic drinks along the back wall. Samantha was wearing what I think are called designer jeans, a light jacket over a heartbreaker sweater, and slightly more war paint than I’d noticed at the office. She carried a small, businesslike leather purse under her left arm.

She closed the door, shucked the jacket, and inhaled. I think most of the guys at the bar inhaled, too. Some of them even whimpered. She gave them a casual once-over, ignored all the daggers coming down the line from the back tables, and then chose the table next to mine. I tipped my glass at her when she sat down, and she gave me a friendly nod, scoring many points for me at the bar. The tables were close enough that we could talk without moving into each other’s space. I asked her how things were going in the head shed at Helios.

“Lots of new faces and interesting questions,” she said. “Which one is that under your table?”

I told her, and then had to explain the genesis of their names. A couple of the more lubricated members of the stool staff were starting to cast lustful if bleary eyes at Samantha while making the usual delicate anatomical observations. She ignored the boozy chatter and accepted a glass of white wine from the bartender. He raised an eyebrow at me, and I nodded.

“Ari said one of your shepherds pulled him out of the river?”

“Yeah, that was Frack-he’s out in the Suburban. Frick here doesn’t much like water. They get everything cleaned up over there in the port?”

She shrugged, indicating she didn’t know. Then she looked over my shoulder at the front door. “ Achtung,” she said quietly.

Colonel Trask stood in the doorway, examining the crowd at the bar like a cop about to make a general roust. There was a tightening of shoulders and turning of faces among the regulars. Then he saw me sitting next to Samantha and walked over. He, too, had changed out of work clothes and was wearing khakis, running shoes, a red and black lumberjack shirt, and an ancient Marine utility cap, complete with a faded eagle embossed above the brim. I was a bit surprised to see what looked like a holstered. 357 Mag strapped onto his right hip. He saw me looking.

“Never leave home without it,” he said, ignoring Samantha. Then he noticed Frick. “May I sit down?” he asked the dog politely.

Frick looked at him as if he were crazy, and I said it was okay, that she’d been fed. He grinned and sat down, but he kept his feet well under his chair. Frick, too, had noticed the hand cannon, and the sight of guns in the open made her alert.

“You’re ahead of me,” he observed and motioned for the bartender to bring him a Bud by pointing at the neon sign. The bartender nodded.

“You’re a single-malt man?” Trask asked. He sat with his back to Samantha, and was probably the only man in the bar who hadn’t looked at her twice.

“It’s Scotch weather,” I said. “The NRC found any smoking neutrons yet?’

“Early days, Lieutenant,” he said. “Most of them are scientists, and they take a while to organize a proper cluster-fuck.”

So now I was a lieutenant again. Coming up in the world? But then I realized he was calling me lieutenant because he expected me to call him colonel. Well, hell, I could do that.

“They’ll be looking at your operation, too?” I asked.

“Oh, shit, yes. But I have a standard answer for that line of questioning-I offer to give any or all of them a can of chicken soup, and then challenge them to get it through my perimeter.”

“Chicken soup.”

“Yup.”

“Radioactive chicken soup?”

“Nope. But it does come in a metal can, as would any radionuclides that decided to go walkabout with human assistance.”

“Are there other ways for radionuclides to get loose?”

“Surely you jest,” he replied.

“Actually, I don’t.”

“Then go online sometime and Google for a site called RADNET plus the word ‘an-thro-po-genic.’ Familiarize yourself with the term Accident in Progress. See what our government’s been co-facilitating in the field of nuclear safety. Have your lunch first, though.”

“You biting the hand that feeds you?”

“You bet. But back to the chicken soup: I’m talking about someone trying to smuggle radioactive water out of Helios. They wouldn’t put it in a Ziploc bag, no matter what the TV ads say.”

“Unless, of course, you’re dealing with a prospective Muslim martyr,” I said. I thought Samantha might be listening to everything we were saying, but the jukebox started up, and then she had to fend off some prospective dance partners. She looked a tad annoyed; maybe she was put off by all the drooling.

Trask nodded. “But then we should have had a second incandescent DOA,” he said, “and that didn’t happen.”

“Or they haven’t found him in the Dumpster behind the mosque,” I said. “Those guys are fucking serious.”

“You’re right as rain about that,” he said. “Problem is, we Americans aren’t. Islam has declared a religious war and we’ve declared democracy back at them. Imagine, democracy in the twelfth century!”

“Probably seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said, but he wasn’t listening. I sensed a rant coming, and sat back to let him vent.

“I don’t know why I give a shit anymore,” he said. “This country is finished. Washed up. Weak in the knees and damp in the panties. Genetically diluted by millions of illegal aliens, all squalling for their ‘rights,’ for God’s sake. Distracted by video games, talk shows, and prancing heiresses’ crotch shots. Half of the population looks like it just graduated from a Chicago feedlot. America deserves what’s coming.”

“There are men and women fighting overseas right now who’d argue with you,” I said.

“Those are the legions on the frontiers of the empire,” he said, warming to what had to be his favorite subject. “Most of them choose to stay out there among the barbarians because they’re disgusted by what’s going on back at the ripening core. A do-nothing, tax-and-spend government, sweaty, sticky-fingered politicians, usurping judges, thoroughly corrupt political parties, elected pedophiles prowling the United States Capitol-shee-it! The new pope got it right: Islam is a religion of blood and iron, but most Americans are happily focused on money, food, sex, and the latest Xbox video game.”

Yee-haw, I thought. Ari had warned me, too. I wanted to argue with him, but I recognized a zealot when I saw one. Besides, I thought he had a point: For a country at war, life in America sure looked like business as usual. I let him babble on, nodding and going along, because I still didn’t know why we were meeting. Finally he began to run down.

“You really a herpetologist?” I asked, trying to steer us out of all the political foaming at the mouth.

“Not in the practicing sense,” he replied. “I studied snakes because I admire them. Elemental creatures with an unusually perfect predation design.”

“Keep them as pets?”

He laughed. “No. Snakes can’t really be pets. They’re reptiles. Primitive animals. A pet implies an emotional quotient, like your shepherd there. Snakes hunt, eat, digest, doze off, sometimes for weeks, and then they hunt again. Kind of like the falcons in days of yore-they were never hunting for their so-called falconer. They were hunting because they were starving. That’s how you train a falcon to hunt, by the way. You capture it, and then you starve it. When it’s just about ready to fall off its perch, you take it hunting.”