Rick Moody: Right Livelihoods

Waiting in the cart, I had ample opportunity to return my attention to Omega Force: Code White by Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell. Let me note in passing that the current fad for the dangling participle in contemporary literature is more than I can take. Hawkes-Mitchell is not on my side. Also, it’s “different from,” not “different than,” Stuart. And “between you and me,” not “between you and I,” you cretin. Hawkes-Mitchell, I felt, really needed to open his style manual. Of course, it was obvious whenever the editor swooped in to attempt to make Stuart sound like he had a brain in his head. These were the lucid portions of the text. The passages Stuart wrote himself are the ones in which the detective narrator, Ernest Piccolo, unburdens himself at great length about beer. There are also “humorous” references to his manhood, which he calls by names like “Willie the Conqueror” and “President Johnson.” These asides are meant to be earthy, but I don’t find them amusing in the least. For comic entertainment, I prefer sketches, dancing girls, ribald verse, that sort of thing. Well, enough said on the subject of stylistic poverty, and on the subject of Detective Ernest Piccolo’s skirt chasing. (When Piccolo meets the infectious-diseases researcher and refers to the engorgement of his “stalk,” the work certainly strains for credulity, likewise thirty lines later, when her “firm breasts belled out into his callused hands.” He’s known her only fifteen minutes!)

I was able to muster these analytical perceptions on the front nine despite having been deprived of my corrective lenses earlier in my ordeal. This difficulty was not insurmountable if I held the book at arm’s length. I could get the gist, and what more than the gist did I require? What was beyond all dispute was the fact that Omega Force: Code White had eerie national security ramifications, especially with respect to matters discussed between myself and federal agent Ed Thorne. I would now like to enumerate for the reader the material contained in Omega Force: Code White that impacted on these ongoing researches.

1) On page 78, Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell, who cleverly creates a so-called front story, a serial-killing spree, to propel his “thriller,” first mentions the proximity of his setting (a resort town on the North Fork of Long Island) to Plum Island, better known to federal government employees as the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, or PIADC, an animal facility also containing the FADDL, or the Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostic Lab, these two together being designated as a level-four bioresearch facility, right here in our Long Island Sound neighborhood.

2) On page 113, Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell alludes to the possibility that the serial killing is no more than a by-product or cover-up tangential to some kind of amphibious assault on Plum Island (and with it the PIADC and FADDL) by foreign hostiles, which conspiracy according to the infectious-diseases researcher with the bell-shaped breasts was generally referred to as an

Omega Force

among counterterrorist experts, which is the very sort of expert the infectious-diseases researcher turns out to be, an

undercover

counterterrorism expert.

3) On page 249, the Omega Force prompts a so-called Code White, in which military specialists from around the country descend on the coasts of Long Island and Connecticut in an effort to defeat wide release of an airborne zoonotic disease, such as West Nile, hantavirus, Ebola, or Rift Valley fever.

I don’t want to give away the ending of Omega Force: Code White, because it’s possible that some of you in the national military-industrial complex will have the time or inclination to read Stuart Hawkes-Mitchell’s fiction. (You may want to skim.) But I don’t think it ruins anything to let you know that Detective Ernest Piccolo, who later in the book actually pulls out a man’s intestines through a gunshot wound and makes his victim look at them, proved so popular among readers that he was brought back (raised from the dead, as it were) in a number of Omega Force prequels and sequels.

What is important is the presence in this potboiler of Plum Island itself, which is very nearly adjacent to our own island. It’s likely that the military has already thought through these issues, that Plum Island is a legitimate military target, one that is well-known to hostiles around the globe, but I would feel remiss if I did not expatiate at length on the issue of targeting, in these remarks.

Before I do so, however, I should add that Ned Roberts Jr. was very kind about driving me around for the next few holes. His father had to ride in the back with the clubs, and this was not ideal, but young Neddie was only too polite, claiming, on the fourth green, to remember taking swimming lessons at the club with Skip, back when they were both young. I watched Ned very nearly sink a hole in one on the fifth, and I experienced only a momentary regret that after Skip’s birth, my wife and I were never again able to conceive.

5. High-Value Targets in the Region

We were on the seventh, a long par four. Not much of a water hazard, although lefties such as myself are in danger when shanking. They are going to lose a ball or two. I said as much to Ned the elder, although he’s a traditional righty. He was appropriately grateful for my advice, because of his son’s three-stroke advantage. I was, however, getting a headache from trying to read the Hawkes-Mitchell, and I was within walking distance of the clubhouse. I could easily have disembarked at any point in order to have a bit of lunch (or late breakfast) while talking over the issues I’m describing here with any persons I might encounter inside. Of course, I was highly regarded at the clubhouse, so that when I turned up there was often merriment among the staff and other members. Furthermore, I could “charge” my lunch without having to produce identification or a credit card of any kind, as I had mislaid my personal identification.

Now, there were any number of ideal targets within ten or twenty miles of myself, the author of these remarks, for those dark-complected persons who wished to strike out against our great nation, and some of them are as follows:

A)

Osprey Nuclear Power Facility

of Niantic, CT. The plant has had safety issues in the past, including using sea-water as coolant for its fuel rods, though seawater is known to be highly corrosive. The plant has received several citations from the Atomic Energy Commission, which I happen to know — from my own government days — is unusual, since the AEC’s initial purpose was, historically, the promotion — not the regulation — of atomic energy. Osprey is good about sending those of us here in the area yearly pamphlets on living downwind of the plant: “What is radiation? Radiation is energy given off in the form of waves and particles. The term ‘radiation’ is broad and includes ordinary sunlight and radio waves.” As it happens, I look directly at Osprey from my breakfast nook, which we added to the house a couple of years ago. My wife was bent on using the very fashionable “modern” architect I mentioned at the outset of these pages, but I insisted that we use someone who was more traditional and able to work in the shingle style for which our island is justifiably famous. The steam rises from the Osprey containment vessels each morning. It’s especially lovely in winter.

B)

General Dynamics Corporation, Electric Boat Division,

New London, CT. Few of us here could fail to have noted that snipers have recently been positioned among sandbags at the Electric Boat dry dock, where Polaris nuclear submarines were once manufactured and may be again in the future — if a political officeholder deems it politically useful. Nuclear submarines are the crown jewels of our naval fleet. Many such submarines are moored upstream in the Thames River. I once traveled to see the christening of one, and I was greatly moved to observe the former military men whose recollections of service brought tears to their eyes at the beholding of that warrior vessel (arrayed with festive bunting).