THE FIFTH BATTALION BOOK TRAILER

Article BE EFFECTIVE

BE EFFECTIVE!

by Michael Priv

A philosopher once said that life is in you today and you are constantly creating your own tomorrow. You are creating tomorrow, you are not creating yesterday. You are done creating your past, it is all finished. So you see, right this very second you are living through the consequences of your creations in the past. If you feel your life could stand a bit of improvement in some areas, well, lets start creating our tomorrow more efficiently and skillfully so we like it in the future when we live it!

Life at its best is an over-the-ramparts charge, life is action, life is brilliant triumphs and bitter defeats, life is lived by YOU. Obviously that can be stressful at times. We all run into this. So let's talk about stress. First of all, stress is not a medical condition and cannot be effectively handled with drugs. You are simply something vastly greater than a sum of the chemicals composing your brain.

Stress comes in the wake of bad habits and inabilities in life. Stress indicates overwhelm, it is a sign of inability and ineffectiveness in resolving life problems. People’s abilities vary but sooner or later we all reach our own stress threshold where the game of life is no longer fun. To word it differently, regardless of our abilities, we could all improve the level of our effectiveness in life and thus push our stress threshold ever higher.

Therefore, if you want to reduce stress, let’s be more effective in the art of living. Let’s be more responsible, skillful and competent in resolving our problems. Right now, today, you are fully capable of handling your stress and anxiety, you can improve your financial situation, regain control over seemingly hopeless situations, make your business more profitable and life more interesting, find love and joy in your personal relationships and yes, you CAN be happy!

Happiness is just a condition of enjoyment of life caused by reaching goals that you set for yourself. You cannot expect to enjoy life without any goals at all or without any possibility of their attainment.

If your life is filled with stress and anxiety here are several simple advices that will immediately help you. The first one is a general extroversion step.

1. Take daily 30-minute walks. Walks twice a day will be twice as effective. Just look around noticing various specific objects situated far away from you and close by, up above and under your feet. Simply walk and pay attention to the houses, cars, airplanes, lamp posts, people’s clothing and other things. Make yourself notice these things.

2. Put together a list of all the things you started but did not complete. This is the key point, definitely do it today. Any action has its END, an exact moment when the action is fully completed. It is not a vague or relative point, it is not a state of mind, it is very simple. An action is completed when you do not have to go back to it, no explanations or justifications are needed, it is FINISHED and there is just nothing more to say. It is DONE. Let us say, you are making a cup of coffee. You went through all the needed actions and here it is—a steaming cup of brew in your hand and the coffeemaker is clean and ready for future use. You are DONE! There is just nothing to qualify or explain so your attention is not stuck on that action anymore, you no longer think about it. If any of your actions do not fit this description, they are simply not finished. Write down all unfinished actions. Your attention is stuck on each of these actions creating the sense of impending doom. Simply make a list of your incomplete actions, large and small, and you will immediately calm down and your general disposition toward life will improve.

3. Now take that list and find in it one simple action that you could complete right now. Complete that action right now. Complete as many SEPARATE and UNFINISHED actions as possible RIGHT NOW. Sort out other unfinished actions, plan out how and when and what it is you need to have to get them completed. But try to complete as many simple things as possible today.

Listen, enough procrastinating already! Clean up your house. Complete that term paper. Finish that project at work TODAY! Get your love-life in order already. Throw the insecurities out the window, call him and tell him you love him. Or, if applicable, eject the bustard out of your life forever! Or if you are a man, get a grip on your inner child, or whatever it is you can comfortably grip, and give her that diamond engagement ring already! But of course, first you may have to complete some actions to make enough money to buy that ring! So plan things out and start completing actions according to your plan. Do not think about it, just do it!

Start with something simple. Definitely clean up your house and—this is important—put things in order—“order” being defined as neat and logical arrangement of things where you can easily find everything. Put your desk and kitchen table or counter in order, put your cloths and shoes in order, clean up your car. You will feel much better long before you get half-way down the list! The most important and wonderful thing that you may experience at this point is that unworthy and really unwanted goals, that you were preoccupied with just a few minutes ago, may clear out revealing your true goals that would actually benefit you and other people and contribute to your happiness.

4. Formulate your goals for a year or two. What would you like to accomplish in that time period? Not what somebody said you should. What do YOU want? Who do you want to BE? What do you have to DO? Okay, now, what do you have to HAVE to do that? Put together a plan. Based on that overall plan, put together a very detailed plan for today-tomorrow and start doing the targets RIGHT NOW. Actually do things. None of it is a mental exercise. Set only attainable goals for yourself, such as quitting smoking, becoming a vegetarian or completing a project of some sort. Finding a job is an attainable goal. So is taking a European cruise with your husband. This goal is fully attainable even if at this point in time you have no money and no husband! To a large enough degree this is just a matter of planning and completing actions. Please realize that if you are right now at point A and you know exactly the location of point B, and you start moving toward it and will continue moving toward it, you WILL eventually reach it!

To summarize, here are the points:

1. Take daily walks, notice objects that surround you.

2. Make a list of the actions you started but have not completed.

3. Complete as many simple actions as possible RIGHT NOW. Put your personal belongings in order.

4. Formulate your goals. Put together a plan of action in general terms (strategy). Put together a plan of action for today-tomorrow (a tactical plan) and start doing the tactical targets TODAY.

Do these steps. You will see as you go along that your stress and anxiety turn into the feeling of self-confidence and being in control over your life. You will become more successful in life, you find yourself being lucky more often and your life will bring a lot more happiness to you and people around you.

Have fun!

Article FLOURISH AND PROSPER!

© 2007 Michael Priv. All Rights Reserved.

FLOURISH AND PROSPER!

Any business could flourish and prosper at any time, in any economic climate. There are no exceptions. The only reason for businesses failure is ignorance or misapplication of certain simple laws. In other words, all business wounds are self-inflicted and failures are internally-generated. These crucial laws are based strictly on common sense and observation but vast majority of people do not have this data. Company such as McDonalds, Coca Cola, Microsoft, Executive Software and many others do have the data and they are using this technology constantly.

The basic laws in running any business are:

1. Use only statistics (stats) to evaluate any aspect of the business.

2. Apply proper condition formulas to the stats.

3. Use stats analysis, data analysis and situation analysis to isolate the bottom-line WHY for any drop in stats.

4. Write short and doable step-by-step programs to handle the WHY and then do the steps until the program is fully completed and stats fully revert.

This article goes mainly into the first two points above because they are absolutely vital in business: Stats and Condition Formulas.

STATISTICS

A statistic is something plotted against something, usually production of something against time. For example, Weekly Gross Income stat is a graph of all the money gotten in this week. It can be compared with last week or last month or last year and conclusion can be drawn, handlings worked out, etc. Contacts/Sales is a stat measuring the daily, weekly, monthly number of contacts with prospective customers and the actual sales. There was 1000 contacts this week and 25 sales and 900 contacts last week that resulted in 35 sales. Such a stat would alert management to the existence of some situation and help them investigate. The end product of such an investigation would be the TERMINATED HANDLING of the situation of high contacts and low sales. “Terminated” means it is handled so it no longer exists at all for now and as much as possible for the future, a total reversion of stats, no more problem at all.

Anything can be statisized, everything in business should be. By comparing graphs of various statistics with each other manager can find that some graphs look very much alike and establish some cause-effect relation between various data. Or he can find some other vital data. For example, with the increasing number of contacts and decreasing sales graphs at hand, the Manager discovered that the increase in contacts was time coincident with increase in the number of telemarketers. That same increase in the number of telemarketers coincides with the drop in actual sales. He investigates and finds out that two experienced telemarketers quit and four new telemarketers were hired. The investigation revealed that (A) the pay system was inadequate which resulted in two good telemarketers quitting and (B) none of the new telemarketers have been trained or drilled to do their job. The handling was based on revising the pay system (increasing sales bonus) and setting up a weekly training class as well as daily 10 minutes of drilling for all telemarketers. On the surface there could be hundreds of reasons, including laziness of the telemarketers, long breaks or the global economy. Actually it was just bad pay and no training. That is called finding a WHY. When you fully handle the WHY, your situation is TOTALLY handled and stats revert. That means the stats are going up, they reached their previous level and keep on going up. If you handle your WHY but the stats didn’t revert, you found a wrong WHY. There is a correct WHY there somewhere, it still needs to be found. Statistics, not hunches or emotions, are crucial for finding the right WHY.

One more thing about a WHY. Here is the law: “WHY” ALWAYS OPENS A DOOR TO A HANDLING. That means that “bad global economic conditions” or “Chinese are running us out of business” or “bad weather” or “it was God’s will” – all such reasons are not real WHYs, they do not open a door to any handling. WHY always opens a door to a handling. Otherwise you have a wrong WHY, i.e. wrong underlying reason for your problem or maybe even a wrong problem! You may be VERY far off the mark on your evaluation if your WHY did not open the door to a handling.

CONDITION FORMULAS

Any activity is always in some condition. That is obvious. It would seem there are billions of possible conditions and every business is so different from any other and all businesses have their own unique circumstances so no classification is possible. Actually, if you consider only hard stats and nothing else, you come up with only a few possible conditions by stats:

Stats are at zero or extremely low Non-Existence

Stat graph went down sharply or keeps

sliding for a long time Danger

Stat graph is level or went slightly down Emergency

Stat goes up little by little Normal Operation

Stat went up sharply Affluence

CONDITION GRAPHS

DANGER

NON-EXISTENCE

EMERGENCY

EMERGENCY

AFFLUENCE

NORMAL

CONDITION FORMULAS

There is a set of steps for each of these conditions which, if followed, will take the business up the conditions into the next condition higher, i.e. it will improve the stats. For example, the stats dropped way down, the condition is Danger. Do the steps of Danger, you will end up in Emergency. Do the steps of the Emergency condition and the stats will start inching up higher than you started from which is the Normal condition, apply the formula for Normal and the stats will shut way up. It is worthwhile to do that if you remember that stats in business directly or indirectly represent only one thing: YOUR MONEY.

Here is an example: the GI (Gross Income) stat dropped slightly this week from 12,000 to 11,000. That is the condition of Emergency. You immediately start applying the Emergency formula:

· Promote

· Change your operating basis

· Prepare to delver

· Economize

· Stiffen discipline

First of all you work out some immediate promotional actions as well as longer term promotion.. You may want to call or write to your old customers, send chocolates or flowers to some of them, put up a big 25% SALE sign, get your web site operational, reduce prices, advertise a gimmick such as NOW OPEN FOR BREAKFAST or FREE T-SHIRT WITH EVERY ORDER or whatever. You may also want to work out a longer term advertisement campaign, set up and sponsor a contest, put up a show, write articles, pay whatever is necessary to Google for much increased exposure on Internet, distribute some flyers, etc.

When you have the promotional actions well in hand, it is time for you to change your operating basis. Obviously, if your operating basis or some aspect of it brought about the condition of Emergency, you better change it or your stats will keep crashing down on you. So what was your operating basis when the stats went down? Aha! You took a habit of ridiculing some of your employees in front of the group. Or you started opening late and closing early. Or you knocked out daily your call-in actions as ineffective. Change it.

Then prepare to deliver. What are you selling? Do you have it in stock? What else do you need to actually deliver? Who else do you need? Whar equipment do you need? You are promoting, you have to make sure you can deliver.

Then you economize. It would seem if the GI is down, you need to economize right away. Not so. You need to promote right away, change your operating basis right away, prepare to deliver right away and only then you can start economizing. If you start economizing right away, you will cut off the resources you need to bring the stats up.

Then you stiffen discipline. That includes your own discipline and work ethics as well as that of your employees. Push through any employees disciplinary actions you were thinking about, start coming in on time yourself, don’t forget to shave, lay off the beer and stop womanizing for now, get more sleep – whatever it is, just stiffen discipline.

The stats will start reverting somewhere half way through the formula but you complete the formula and then go straight into doing the Normal condition formula. The first step of Normal is DON’T CHANGE ANYTHING. Stats are going up, so why change anything? So keep the actions you have been doing in. Just keep doing your routine. Go to the next step. And so on up the conditions.

There is a lot more to this but this is the road to prosperity. Any business can and should flourish and prosper.

The basic laws in running any business are:

1. Use only statistics (stats) to evaluate any aspect of the business.

2. Apply proper condition formulas to the stats.

3. Use stats analysis, data analysis and situation analysis to isolate the bottom-line WHY for any drop in stats.

4. Write short and doable step-by-step programs to handle the WHY and then do the steps until the program is fully completed and stats fully revert.

Michael Priv

Advanced Business Consulting

510-316-3346

FOREVER DEAD (incomplete)

FOREVER DEAD

by Michael Priv

CHAPTER ONE

THE FIFTH BATALLION

FOREVER

“Sparky, reload the Big Bertha, now! Two minutes. All stations stand ready! Safety procedure Code Red. 2^nd Mate out.” I hear 2^nd Mate’s voice, thick with urgency and desperation, in my earpiece. I shudder. Big Bertha? Suicide. No time for Code Red checklist anyway.

“Yes, Sir! Big Bertha reload. Sparky out.” I report back. “Baltu, power to the bleed capacitors, Checklist Procedure Code Red. Now!” I yell to my only remaining crew, the Second Lineman Baltugirbaldorge—and that is just his first name.

“Ette, no! Fire the Big Bertha? We are too close to the planet. No! We’ll fry!” Baltu bleats in his usual irritating falsetto, staring up at me incredulously and waving his tiny arms in the air. “It is suicide, Ette!”

“Non-compliance?! Order on deck! No Ette here, Second Lineman, you hear? Either the Power Drive Commander or Sparky as per the Regulations! Comply with your orders!”

“Yes, Sir!” my diminutive Second Lineman squeaks exactly per the Regs, his hands already frantic on the keyboard. Better. Officers of either sex are addressed as “Sir” in His Majesty’s Space Navy.

“Discharge in 100, work the main engine power!”

“Yes, Sir!”

We are a flurry of motion in our tiny power plant Control Room. It is really a three-man job.

The battle monitors above my head indicate that our HMS “Corsair” has started on a course that with any luck would quickly bring us behind the huge enemy Battlebase at which point the enemy hull would be positioned between us and the yellow planet not even ten thousand miles away. The Big Bertha surplus power discharge blast would bounce off the planet, knocking off most of anything alive there, return as a backlash and wipe us out. Clear as day. Of course, theoretically we have a survival chance if we manage to sit out worst of the backlash behind the massive Battlebase. We just have to fire Big Bertha at the very last precise instant before getting eclipsed by the Battlebase hull. An instant too early and we would still be exposed and unprotected when our energy discharge hits us on the rebound. An instant too late and our blast would fry the Battlebase about fifty miles away and instantaneously vaporize our relatively small Corsair. It must be done at that one precise instant. What an impossible maneuver! We must be really desperate.

On the battle monitors overhead I see at least three dozen small dots circling and converging upon us from all directions. Judging by our constant half-rotations and lurching pattern, some of our starboard sensory equipment is gone. A blimp that represents one of the enemy fighters on the monitor suddenly flairs up for an instant and then vanishes. Our firepower overwhelmed their force screens. Bye-bye! Too bad we will not be able to overwhelm much of anything else for a while. I am cutting down the power to our guns already to reduce energy consumption while simultaneously increasing the power plant output to create the surplus energy that we need in order to charge up the surplus capacitors and then discharge them into space.

“Eighty-nine percent, Sir! Sparky out.” I bark my report to the 2^nd Mate.

2^nd Mate’s voice, “Ack! Sixty seconds, all stations! May Great Minda be with you all! 2^nd Mate out.”

The count-down just indicates that exact instant when we fire Big Bertha or die. It has nothing at all to do with the degree of my readiness to fire. At my end, first I have to have 100% on all the power levels. We are only at seventy-nine now. Only then could the bleed-out capacitors start absorbing the excess power. And that is not all, either. In order to achieve the intended effect of using Big Bertha as a weapon, I have to push the power surplus up to at least six thousand giganots above 100% ship capacity. Enough power to light up and heat up all the cities on an average size industrialized planet, such as our beautiful Ro, for at least a week.

“On easy plus ten!” Baltu yells at me excitedly. In our energy consumption we are down to just ten percent over the survivable minimum. I complete the force screens adjustment to minimum.

“Ack, Baltu! Good job! Keep going!” Then to the 2nd Mate, “On easy plus ten! Force screens on minimal. Sparky out.” The ship rocks under enemy fire with the minimal force screens to protect us. Lights momentarily flick off and came back on, sirens blare, indicating . All the minimals are calculated and get constantly adjusted by the main computer that we lovingly call the Ogre. I hope the Ogre is right.

“Power on easy!” bleats Baltu.

“Ack!” We are not going very far now with the power plant output essentially going nowhere but directly to bleed capacitors.

Baltu is a Rikuyan, he is dark, small and hairy, about half my size. He used to tell me, staring straight up into my eyes longingly, that he liked to make love to large women. I wonder what he did with them. Kind of like a dog who used to bark at and chase our Surface Armored Personnel Transport back at the base. The Surface APT is a heavily armored battle machine about thirty feet long and as tall as a two-story house, bristling with guns. What would the dumb animal do with that behemoth if he caught it, I wonder? My arm from elbow down is about the size of Baltu’s entire leg. Have to admit that I was a little curious at times. Not any more, not since I promised Din to be his woman. My dearest Din . . .

Baltu is typing feverishly on his console and working the Power Grid panel now, I am pounding in my weapons energy codes to adjust the gunnery output while reducing the life support levels—carefully—coordinating with Ogre on the interface link. Tables and algorithms are streaming down my main diagnostics screen. I do not like what I see, we are reducing intake and increasing power plant output too rapidly. I make slight adjustments. Levels of energy output can be increased rapidly and safely but any reduction of energy consumption must be done very carefully as the resultant energy surge could instantaneously make us look like a super nova.

“2^nd Mate, double Bristol guns down to twenty percent, Riders are still at fifty-eight! Sparky out.” Our main guns are basically useless now and the eight small ones are down to a bit over half-capacity. We can no longer penetrate the enemy force screens even with sustained fire. But we continue firing with same intensity just to conceal our intention to fire the Big Bertha. The enemy has skillfully horded us to this planet specifically in an attempt to capture us by neutralizing the Big Bertha. Now we are forced to use the Big Bertha anyway. We have to quickly reduce energy output to build up the energy surplus that we need.

Just seconds left! I love you, Din. I feel my heart squeeze painfully and bitterly. Din is a Special Ordinance Officer, my lover. My dear, dear Din. We are both from Ro, the only two Roans on the ship. When will this insanity end? Din and I, we want kids, several. He would make such an excellent father, so gentle and patient! We wanted to grow old together. Will that ever be?

“Sparky, Big Bertha Code Go in twenty seconds! Count-down at ten! 2^nd Mate out.”

Getting Big Bertha ready is really a three-man job but we are down to two people now. We just lost Bull a few minutes ago. He is still dying in the Main Access Chamber. Nothing we can do for him now. He was replacing one of the self-diagnostic insert units in full anti-radiation gear in the Chamber when we took a hit from the Battlebase. The impact caused one of the phase connectors to fail resulting momentary in a radiation leak right when Bull was next to the housing. The emergency localized force field did not come on as it was supposed to because of the coincidental momentary electrical system failure, just for a fraction of a second. Then it was too late. The siren blasted and the heavy Chamber doors slammed shut with a thud of terrible finality. It would take a full Protocol with a double mop-up action back at the base to reset the doors. We could see Bull dying in the Chamber through the small leaded glass window. I saw him mouthing the name “Ynoma” to me through the visor of his anti-radiation suit which was supposed to save him but won’t. Bull was staring straight into my eyes. Yes, Bull, I will take care of your daughter—if I ever get out of here alive. Die well, my friend. I reported the loss to the 2^nd Mate and got his ack back. That was that.

The count-down starts. Sirens blaring throughout the ship. We quickly strap ourselves. I mumble a quick prayer to the Eternally Kind Minda asking Him to keep Din safe. I would not ask for myself because I never believed in Minda—up to this instant.

“. . . four . . . three . . .” Well here we go, ready or not. “. . . two . . . one!” I hit the key and almost instantly our Corsair heaves and lurches mightily and then the blow of backwash turns everything up side down, there is an explosion. The force literally rips my console chair out and hurdles it sideways across the room, slamming my body against the Chamber entrance security console hard, something snaps, something hits me on the head. The last thing I see is a heavy auxiliary power cell unit flying through our small Control Room straight into Baltu.

And the dead body of the Second Lineman Baltugirbaldorge is the first thing I see as I regain consciousness. Poor Baltu, my little friend. His chest is crushed by a run away auxiliary cell that was blown off its strapping. I cannot focus and I feel absolutely nothing below my neck. Above my neck is just pain, fog and confusion. Complete dead silence envelops me comfortably on all sides. My mother is whispering, “Sleep, my baby, sleep.” Wait a minute! Where am I? Why is everything so quiet? I strain to understand and finally realize that the explosion blew out my eardrums. The world is heaving up and down around me, like a boat on stormy sea. Up! Down! Up! Down!

I must get up and check on the others, I am an officer. I have to check on Din, too. I cannot move. “Din!” No sound comes out. Or is it just that I can’t hear the sound? Do sounds exist if you can’t hear them? If a tree falls in the forest and I cannot hear it, then did I really give orders that sent both Bull and Baltu to their death?

Boating with my family, fun-filled sunny day, waves lazily licking the bow. My father taught us to fish. I caught one fish and let it go. My brother Luniy laughed and called me a sissy. I opened my eyes. “Hi, Luniy!” My brother is standing over me, looking at me, smiling! I love you, my big brother! Have I ever told you I loved you? Probably not. Things clear up a bit. Oh, it is not Luniy, it is the Signals Officer Burak. He is not smiling. Not at all. I guess he is the highest ranking surviving officer now. He is giving me an injection in the neck. Is it a sedative or euthanasia? The euthanasia pump is red, it is locked in a separate zipped compartment of the emergency kit. I do not see the color of the pump or how and where the pump came from.

“Burak, don’t kill me”, I am begging now, “it is just a concussion, I’ll be okay, I can still fight! Please!”

No sounds come out. I close my eyes. Was it a sedative or euthanasia? The red pump or the blue pump?

I feel good. I feel calm. We’ll be alright, Din. I am gently falling, falling, falling, falling, falling, falling, fa . . .

---------------------------

“I am disappointed, Gordon. Mr. Bolstad, I am taking to you! Frankly, I am not certain in your ability to successfully cope with our pressures here if you can’t even concentrate long enough to get scolded!”

What’s the hell is . . . Where . . ? Oh, yeah, that is Mr. Pettit, my boss. I am in San Francisco, a lowly lab technician successfully managing to screw up even at that. The cleanly shaven flab of flash under Mr. Pettit’s chin was shaking indignantly in front of my face. Mr. Pettit is a tall portly gentleman. I like him, he is a cool old geezer. My memories are so vivid, they keep dragging me back into my past, into my Hell. Everybody’s past is hellish, we all went through roughly the same crap. I am not unique in any other way that I ever noticed either.

“You simply lack attention to detail. You are constantly daydreaming. You must start paying attention to work if you want to work here. You are a chemist! No room for errors in this lab. Here. Look at your today’s PH test report and here is yesterday’s. The cleaning solution. See this? The solution was diluted with distilled water between tests to counter evaporation. How, in the name of almighty Zeus, could that possibly result in a PH drop by a full point? H-m?” Mr. Pettit’s large kindly face puckered sarcastically.

I am silent. What can I say? And why say anything? The PH of an acidic solution diluted with distilled water should have risen, I know.

“Gordon, you are a fine and intelligent young man. I wish you well. But it is not the first time I am confronted with your ludicrous errors. It is not my job to catch all the dropped balls. We work for the military, you know. We cannot afford mistakes. Please get yourself together and start paying attention. Stop sleepwalking. Get with it! Focus! Get married . . . or get a hamster or something! Why can’t you be more like everybody else?” I could almost taste Mr. Pettit’s frustration, his large well-groomed hands flailing, thin reddish-gray hair on the fringes of his otherwise bold and now perspiring head in disarray. I wish I could get myself up to the point of giving a damn.

“Okay, Mr. Pettit, I will reform, I promise.”

Why can’t I be like everybody else . . . I am exactly like everybody else, just an average guy. Walking back to my lab station I glance at Greg and Jeffrey dejectedly. They are grinning and horsing around as usual. Linda gives me a very concerned look and blows me a kiss. We met two years ago . . . this time around. I just started at San Francisco Chinua Laboratories then. Linda adored me from day one, it seems. She went for me first at the Christmas party at Hilton, getting all worked up, panting and all, her hands everywhere, warmth of her eager mouth, wetness . . . I do not really care at this point. I just cannot bring myself up to the point of caring about anything or anybody anymore. There is just nothing left in life for me except dull, endless grayness. The hellish eternity. . . It is just too boring, absolutely, teeth-gratingly boring. And excruciatingly pointless, too. Tragic, really. There is just absolutely no meaning to it all.

Meaning of life? Give me a break. There is just nothing else you can do! At any point in time, always and forever and ever and ever and ever, you are standing at the threshold of eternity with the bottomless pit of meaningless future ahead of you. The pit simply does not get any less bottomless no matter when, how and why you look at it. There is no intrinsic, higher or hidden meaning to life, it is just what it is—a bottomless pit.

Yes, I am just like everybody else—I live forever. Or I die forever, depending how you look at it. Unlike pretty much everybody else, however, I can recall my entire existence—to a degree. I know the scoop, the score, the way the cookie crumbles. I know what really happened. I know what is really going on. I can remember my earlier lives and deaths. Others can’t. Not that their past does not affect them now. Of course it does, it is their past. It does not go away just because they cannot remember it. And it is true, they cannot. I can. I do.

I walk home. I used to like San Francisco but now I do not even see it. Surreal, dreamlike, shadowy world all around me. Tinsel flashy cars, cardboard ornate buildings, wound up dolls moving around aimlessly. Everything is just cheap sets and props in a tasteless farce—a thin, haphazardly slapped together set for a giant movie. Who wrote the script? Who is shooting the movie? Who are the viewers? Ah, wouldn’t you want to know! Wouldn’t that give it all at least some purpose, put some rational into this insanity! Who is running the show? God? Devil? Bill Gates? Angelina Joule, perhaps? Trust me, you do not want to know. You are better off dreaming about any kind of sense or purpose to it all.

“Hey, looser, gimme your money! I’ll fuck you up!”

White trash with a knife. I could take that knife away from him and feed it to him in under two seconds, just as they taught me in a zillion armies scattered all around the Universe, fighting for dubious long-gone causes under the standards of obscure and insignificant Empires. Pointless. I give him my wallet. He whips out a few dollars I have there and throws the wallet hatefully into my face. I do not return the hate. What does he know? He lives in a bliss, he thinks he will eventually die and that will be the end of him. Ha! True, he will die. Then fifteen minutes of the Between Lives Crew’s’ nurturing ministrations and start again he will, as sure as clockwork, he will start all over again—surprise! Diapers, first “Mama”, first step, first kiss, first stolen car, first knocked off 7-11, first time in the slammer—and so it goes.

Most probably, things will not go any better for him next time around, although he has a major say in it all at any point, kind of like swimming against the current. The current that pulls him along is Karma. You know how merciless, relentless and unyielding Karma is? Do you realize that Karma is simply the punishment you personally wield against yourself for all those your boo-boo’s? Nobody and nothing is doing it to you, there is just nobody there to do anything to anybody. You personally and on your own lonesome are just getting even with yourself for the bad things you did to others. You sure done it, man! Now you pay. You knock yourself out in whatever ways you can, knocking out your own abilities to hurt others. That is Karma. No reason to wield my pitiful vengeance upon this tormented sole now.

I finally make it home. The place was turned up side down. Somebody was here rampaging through my things, looking for something, obviously. Who could that be? The Guards? Who cares? Linda will help me clean up—later. She likes the domestic shuffle.

Yvette is sleeping already. My dear little bird. Too bad. She is quite a comedian, I could stand some cheering up right now. Yvette is a Sparrow I found as a baby a few years ago and raised to maturity. She was a tiny pink thing with a huge yellow mouth at first. I fed her chicken soup mixed with baby formula every hour or two. I also built her a huge six-foot redwood cage, undoubtedly the most elaborate Sparrow cage in the known Universe. Oh, the riches and splendor of that cage! Taj Mohall would just be a chicken coop by comparison. Yvette ignored the cage utterly and slept in the kitchen cupboard, heroically defending it against any and all intruders, namely me. Yvette and I enjoy our time together. I often read in my arm chair or work on my computer at the desk with Yvette snuggled on my shoulder, in the crane of my neck. My tiny friend, my little bird.

I normally hate my home, except for Yvette. Now I just do not care. I eat something, not sure what. Numbness. Linda calls as usual to wish me good night and ask if I want her to drop by. I don’t.

Sleep. Dreams. Stark and barren landscape of a large asteroid lost in space. Everything is always lost in space because Space is just so damn mind-bogglingly huge! It is a recurring dream. In my dream I am just sitting on a rock on the surface of a large asteroid watching the bottomless Space. I know exactly what happened just before that instant of eternity and what will happen next, I simply do not wish to think about it. Talking about pointless!

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It was supposed to be a joy-ride, just a Courier mission. My orders came directly from the General, apparently, to deliver a communications pouch from our Third Marine Division Base to the Imperial Space Defense Headquarters on Zacharius, a huge spaceship. I have no idea, of course, what I am carrying—they never tell you anything. Could’ve been just a birthday present for the General’s old lady, for all I know. I thought it was going to be a rather relaxing mission—about three weeks to get there, a week of R&R at Zacharius, three weeks back, catch up on some sleep and lots of movies and porn on my vid or virt.

Vids are devices similar to DVD players. Virts are virtual reality devices, more real than life sometimes, if you want them to be. Let’s say you wanted to know what it’d be like to have a roll in the hay with a Xzean whore, considered—at least by my buddies—the best lay in the known Universe. With a multitude of extra super-erogenous zones on their bodies, Xze females are all nymphomaniacs, as the rumors go. An average guy, such as myself, could no more hope for sex with a Xzean whore than a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. But with a virt helmet on, you were sure right there, man, all for a price of a good dinner! I was looking forward to that.

Zacharius was the HQ, a colossal structure. It was built in space and it never landed anywhere because it would not be able to take off. Zacharius housed a full Deep Space Destroyers Division, a Marine Division, a special Zacharius Base Crew Division and all kinds of added troops, Command Support staff and general staff, families, about 300,000 people in all. Officers were allowed to have their wives and families there. No idea how they lived, we were forbidden to enter the officers quarters under the penalty of death. But I knew that in the Lower Quarters, deep in the bowels, there were restaurants, bars, bordellos, hookers at every corner and on call, vid theatres as well as the wildest virt joints—all for enlisted personnel and non-military support crews. I was sure looking forward to getting laid and having some good food on Zacharius! At our base on Xenon we enjoyed a perpetual Condition Two schedule: eight hours on, eight hours stand-by, eight hours off, no days off.

XM-501 “Bobcat” was my favorite one-man fighter ship. It was powerful, offered relatively decent living conditions and was equipped with a synchronized pair of particle beam guns. A particle beam gun is basically just a directional energy flow weapon. Regular DEF guns just emit a tight flow of neurons, protons or electrons at the speed of light. A particle beam weapon is different in that an extremely brief counter flow is introduced into the energy flow every one-millionth of a second. These tiny counter flows create tiny ridges of energy that behave like, and in fact are, matter. So this gun was, in fact, emitting a stream of tiny particles at nearly the speed of light, one million per second. With my two guns I could obliterate a target the size of, let’s say, an Empire State Building in about a second or so. I used to love blowing up things and building things. It was just a game for me. What else are you going to do as a game? What do kids do in a sand box? You build things, destroy them and then you build them all over again.

My pleasure ride did not turn out as planned. About five days into it I ran into an enemy Destroyer, a Cobra-class patrol vessel with a crew of sixteen and enough firepower to obliterate a planet. Well, okay, maybe a small planet, like Moon or something. As soon as my early warning system started bleating I sent a message to the Base asking for help. The answer that came back did not bring me any happiness. The bustards replied that they had their hands full to send a rescue mission right that minute, maybe later. I was instructed to do procedure 11-18, “Evade and Escape”. Thanks!

The enemy Captain raised me on the close-range commlink speaking in broken Standard. Apparently they were after the delivery pouch. They knew about it! Our base was full of spies. So could I be a decoy then? If so, I was doomed—the whole intention for me would be to get chased after and die.

The Cipili ship Captain offered me to surrender and subject myself to the standard POW treatment per the Rules of Engagement. Any captured enemy combatant automatically receives a ten-year hard labor sentence to be served at Emperor’s discretion. Basically an Emperor’s slave working the mines or farms, mopping up after radiation spills, things like that. No, thanks. I made a really lousy slave, I experienced it many a life-time and really did not want to go there. I responded with the only swear phrase I could remember in Cipilu. I was told it had something to do with sodomizing their particularly repulsive local lizard. The commlink went dead. I thought I did alright, never liked officers anyway, particularly enemy officers. I believed I could outrun or outmaneuver them.

The Cobra stayed on my tail for some days. I went way off course leading them away from Zacharius per the Standard Operating Procedure, the Law. As if they didn’t know the location of the Headquarters already! And as if Zacharius could not defend itself against a thousand Cobras! I just could not shake them off. They gained enough on me to use their guns every once in a while just to keep me on my toes. I had to have my force screen on most of the time, which drained too much power. I could not keep it up much longer.

My scanners indicated a presence of a large mass less than half a million miles away, as the proverbial crow flies. The mass was much larger than a spaceship. Must be an asteroid. I locked my Bobcat on the asteroid and typed orbiting commands on my keyboard. Then I had to turn off the engine and direct all energy to the force screen to protect me from the enemy’s now incessant shooting.

My strategy was simple, even dull, but it was the best I could think of. I would get within a couple of hundred miles from the asteroid, into its gravitational field, and maneuver the Bobcat to stay on that orbit going around the asteroid. At my relative speed of travel, the maneuver would strain the ship and create a significant g-force for me to grapple with. That was fine, according to my computer, we could take it. The idea was, obviously, that the much heavier Cobra would not be able to make the turn at this speed. It would shoot off at a tangent and then come back, allowing me to gain sufficient distance to get away. Nothing very original, really, textbook stuff. They stayed on my tail so they must have taken the bait.

Of course the dicey point was right at the moment of the turn. In order to make such a turn and stay on my orbit, I would have to re-direct all power to the side thrusters and break thrusters momentarily. No more force screen, no defense. The whole strategy was that in order to make the turn, they would have to re-direct the power from their guns to their thrusters a bit earlier because they were heavier. And then they wouldn’t be able to make the turn, they would just gain acceleration and shoot off into space at a tangent. I sure hoped they were that dumb.

It turned out they were not. They were simply not planning to make the turn at all. They just waited for me to drop my defenses and scorched my behind but good! The jolt was so violent, it knocked me out for a minute. The blast must have been carefully measured not to destroy the Bobcat but just get it to crash on the asteroid so they’d be able to do their tangential detour, come back and retrieve the pouch.

The computer gave Bobcat enough of a thrust and direction right before they fried my main thrusters, seriously damaged my power plant and the life support system. I had my space suite on since I first met up with the enemy vessel, as I was supposed to per the Regs. I knew, without the power plant I would never get out of here alive now, the party was over. Of course my beacon kept transmitting my position to the Base. They might eventually send a search mission this way, to retrieve the bag I was carrying, if nothing else. How long would that take? The oxygen in the space suite was getting regenerated nearly at the same rate as I was consuming it. Very nearly. I could probably go for three days longer. I could still walk out of this in one piece if the Base sent somebody after me as soon as their equipment indicated that I went off course. Or if I could take over the enemy Cobra and live on their life support. If. . .

How important for the Base was the retrieval of the pouch I was carrying? Was I a decoy? I did unthinkable—I broke the seal and opened the pouch. It was empty. Damn!

Meanwhile my Bobcat kept turning into the orbit, I added as much side thrust as I could manually, taking my g-force punishment with a great deal of exhilaration. I had nothing to hope for but I sure enjoyed a feel of the Bobcat in motion!

I went out of Cobra range immediately as I started turning, I got my butt burned off in a fraction of a second that I was in their range with defenses down. The Destroyer’s Captain started a turning maneuver of his own, not intending, of course, to make the full turn. He was going to overshoot the asteroid but it did not do me any good now.

He overshot the asteroid orbit and went off on a tangent.

I hit the ground very hard considering the small size of the asteroid. Must be mostly metallic and rotating pretty damn fast for that much gravity. As expected, my harnesses and anti-grav seat protected me well enough. I checked the hardware. The main computer was fried, the power was down, life support system was gone. But the guns showed six percent capacity and the gunnery computer came on line with its usual energetic little chime. There was nothing to do except waiting for suffocation that was as inevitable as snow in the winter—where I grew up.

Not sure how long I was sitting there in the darkness thinking, some hours, I guess, when I finally saw Cobra coming back for me. They really wanted the empty pouch, these idiots. Cobra touched down, dislodging all kinds of debris, no more than half a mile from me. All my electronics were off, even the guns, to show dead on their power scanners. Of course their force screens were off, can’t have them on when on the ground. I saw a boarding party disembark, five suited up figures on stark background, armed with hand-held weapons. They assembled by the air lock around their sergeant doing a low-grav walk checklist, my best guess. Repel borders? Surrender? Give them the empty pouch “Hey, you, buggers, here, knock yourselves out”? No. I keep the pledges once given. Time to kill and then time to die. In that sequence.

I flipped the guns computer on, keyed in the codes and turned and pushed in the vector knob, setting and locking the target quickly, and then let them have it with my six percent. The salvo literally tore Cobra in half. Nobody inside could have survived the blast. The air lock area partially vaporized together with the boarding party next to it.

I unhurriedly got out of my Bobcat wreckage. Hey, why hurry? I had all the time in the world! I took a leisurely stroll to the pile of junk that up to very recently had been Cobra, the Destroyer, with sixteen breathing and thinking beings on board. Oh, right, I forgot, they were not really people, they were the enemy, the much hated and despised Cipili, very-very different from us. Totally different. Nothing in common. According to our Propaganda Officer, their Emperor was much worse than our Emperor in many ways. I guess their asshole was even crazier and more perverted than ours, if that was even possible. Poor buggers.

I saw a few random body parts that till recently belonged to the boarding party members along the way. Particle beam weapons can sure rearrange body parts in a hurry. I examined the wreckage of Cobra. Twisted hardware, about a dozen decimated bodies inside. I tried their life support system. No joy. Cobra was dead just like its crew. Just like my Bobcat. Just like me. I went outside and set down on a rock next to the enemy ship I destroyed and sixteen more corpses on my conscience and looked at the stark view of Space. Eventually I died. Death sucks.

MY LOVE

On the way to work in San Francisco next morning I noticed a Yellow Cab with the large black number 3415 on it parked half a block from my house. Haven’t I seen it yesterday too, come to think of it? Of course everything was unreal and dreamlike in my world in my current condition, everything except my past, that is, but I have been around for too long to miss the fact that somebody was “tending the sheep” as we used to call shadowing a suspect when I was a cop in Rome under Tiberius a very long time ago.

Well, fine. What could anybody possibly do to me? Arrest me? Probably just the Guards checking up on me again. Or the Priests. Or the MPs looking for our Commanding Officer Brell again. Screw them all.

I tried to pay attention to my work now, I really did not want to get fired. No, not that depressing job hunting routine again! I would probably end up in the Army, as usual. Military is always the easiest job to find. Would probably end up in Iraq somewhere, or in Afghanistan, and get myself killed again for some not-too-bright and obscure politician. And then get born as an Arab. No, I am better off here at the Lab, with Linda, where I don’t have to shoot anybody and nobody is shooting at me . . . so far.

Linda immediately saw a change in me and was very pleased. She called me Picky and kissed me when nobody was around. She checked my work quickly, trying to catch any obvious mistakes to save me from trouble, but did not find any. Linda. Nice name. I can’t remember her ever having this name before. Ursula, yes, I remember her as Ursula once, that was one hell of a life time.

Linda was the only person who called me Picky. It was a nick name she gave me after one of my work buddies characterized me to her as “a few sandwiches short of a complete picnic—but a nice guy”. She loved it and called me Picnic or Picky ever since. Sometimes she just called me “Nice Guy”.

Depressed as I was, I enjoyed having Linda around. I bet she was surprised to find herself in love with a young, white weirdo such as myself. A nice, well educated black lady from a good family. To be totally honest, an overweight black mama, eight years my senior, would not be the first thing that immediately jumped to my mind as my ideal sex partner, either. That would all seem extremely odd if I did not know the real way the cookie crumbled. Not the slapstick farce that people are fed as reality around here but the actual truth.

I can’t remember the first time I ever met Linda but I remember several of our life-times together. I was a woman in at least two of them, while she had male bodies. Even as a man she was on a gentle and nurturing side. But being a man or a woman, to really grasp the incredible sizzling power of true lust, and the real sense of love, closeness and understanding, all I had to do was remember my life with Ursula.

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Actually, for me it was two life times but only one for her. We grew up as neighbors near Liege, Belgium about a thousand years ago. I was about five when I recognized her in a three-year old neighbor’s daughter. When Ursula, or Ussi as I used to call her then, was old enough to play with me we splashed together in our beautiful river, the Meuse, under the watchful eye of aunts and sisters, we ran in the fields, played hopscotch, hide and go seek and a million other games. We shared our first awkward kiss when she was about nine or so. By the time she was eleven we were copulating like rabbits any chance we had. And we had lots of chances. Boy, was that intense and pleasurable! I knew all along that we had been together before but Ursula could not remember any of our past lives together, as usual. She used to call me crazy for of my stories.

But I actually made her believe me that she lived before and we were lovers then too. That was when I told her how she died about a thousand years prior, which would make it roughly two thousand years ago. She was a man then, by the name Theodoric, we were Germans. I was Theodoric’s wife, my name was Adelheide. We were both killed in a battle with the Romans. Romans just couldn’t stay away from us, no idea why. They just absolutely had to cross the Rhine River and set up their stinking forts in our forests. We kept fighting those pretty Roman boys with their plumes and flashy cloths inflicting terrible losses on them—and ourselves. They would always return to fight us again.

In those days it was not very customary for a German woman to take arms but it was not entirely unheard of and I was not a very customary woman anyway. Or a very feminine woman, either. It was an easy and obvious decision for me to fight shoulder to shoulder with my Lover. The spiritual being I loved through the millennia happened to be a male by the name Theodoric at that time. Where else would I want to be when the battle was joined if not fighting next to him? Theodoric (Ursula, Linda – same person) was killed by an arrow into the throat, he must have died fast. I outlived him by only some seconds. I was killed with a spear through the chest but not before I charged the suddenly terrified adolescent archer who shot that fatal arrow, and succeeded in hacking his head off with my heavy sword.

When I told Ursula that she died that time from an arrow through the throat, she cried in pain, grabbed her throat and coughed so hard that she was soon spitting blood. She was so sick for a few days and her throat hurt so much that I promised myself then and there to never again tell anybody their past deaths. Her family tried to cure her using various herbs and even invited Old Martha, the Whisperer. Of course the illness went away in a few days by itself, it was not a real illness, just a trick of the mind. Most illnesses are. Naturally, Old Martha got all the credit for the speedy recovery.

From that point on, during that life-time, Ursula never doubted our past lives together.

Ursula eventually got pregnant, of course. I think she was about fourteen then. It was an incredible insult to her family. I was regarded with utmost contempt and animosity by that clan. They decided to send for Old Martha who could help abort the baby. Not in a million years! Nobody kills MY baby. Who did these people thought they were? They have known Ursula for just fourteen short years and they thought they were already entitled to pass judgments and make life or death decisions for OUR child? Never.

I grabbed Ursula and a few belongings and left home with my parents’ blessing in our one-horse cart. We traveled in secret some 120 miles west to Ostend, a North Sea coastal town, I had an uncle there.

My uncle set us up with a room in their communal Big House and got me a job as a fisherman. Ursula stayed home. She had our baby, a big, healthy boy. We called him Thomas. I was away at sea for several days straight and then home for a few days. Business was good. In a couple of years we managed to buy a small three-room house on the outskirts, had another baby, a girl this time, little Agnes. Ursula kept the house nice, I loved my family to pieces. My life just could not have possibly been any better. I thought the bliss would last forever but it only lasted for about four years. Then my fishing schooner with a crew of eight capsized during a storm. All eight of us were lost at sea. I was only about twenty then, Ussi was about eighteen. Drowning was easy, losing Ursula was not.

I did my best to be born as a boy at Ostend, of course, to come back to my Ussi and kids. I did not succeed as usual, I was very bad at that. I heard of some people who could retain their sense of orientation and full sight perception when devoid of a body. Not me. I was disoriented and nearly blind between lives. My perceptions were dim. That is how I ended up in Eindhoven, a part of Germany then but really in Holland, about 200 miles east from Ostend. At least I turned out to be a boy! My new parents were very good people, they gave me a nice and manly name Edgar. I liked them and my new life. When I was about eleven I was ready to look for Ussi again, by then I knew already where Ostend was.

Unfortunately, right then we were raided by the Vikings. The filthy creatures struck at dawn taking the town by surprise. There was no time to organize any defense, each house fought on its own. We fought the enemy as a family but we could not match them. My father, uncle and older brother were all killed defending our home. They killed my baby sister too and burned our house in revenge for taking out half a dozen of the hairy beasts. I helped dad kill one of them, it was not easy. At eleven years of age, my body was approximately one-eighth of that of the powerful Northman’s. I jumped on his back and must have stubbed him a dozen times with a long kitchen knife while my father was sward fighting with him and then my farther drove his sward deep into his chest but it still took us some agonizing minutes to finally kill the beast. Enjoy Valhalla, you murderous thug!

When the dust settled, being eleven years old, I became the head of our devastated household having to take care of my now homeless family—my mother, her sister, two small nieces and my younger brother. Getting help from neighbors was not an option since we were all in roughly the same pitiful shape. Things looked absolutely desperate but then Old Adelbrecht took charge. I thought he was just another old geezer. Turned out he wasn’t. He was a great leader. We quickly buried the dead under his command and cleared out the debris. He appointed three largest surviving males, the Ulrich brothers, as our police force and announced Martial Law till further notice. That just meant immediate beheading as the punishment for any and all crimes, proven or not, with no public hearing or any due process of Law. We quickly set up the centralized care for the wounded, re-built the damaged Big House and our burnt down Church-house, built lean-to’s and shads for everybody, combined and attended to the surviving live stock and took care of the fields.

Things settled down eventually, as they invariably do. Ulrich brothers quietly returned to their tanning business. Old Adelbrecht just relinquished his power one day and went back to sitting at the Suchen (our tavern) all day with a bunch of old geezers sipping ale and sharing war stories. I gave him a huge bronze medallion that I took off the Northman I helped kill. Old Alderbrecht always wore it with pride.

Life went on. People are incredibly resilient. They burry their dead and keep going. My mom and her sister both re-married. I was finally free to go so I walked to Ostend.

By the time I caught up with Ursula I was sixteen. My heart skipped quite a few beats when I saw her. She was about thirty-six then, looked even more beautiful but tired, she was not happy, I could tell. Ursula still lived in our old house with her new husband Phillies now. He was a mean, burly guy, about fifteen years her senior. A strong, silent type. A tough guy. A total jerk, in other words. I hated him right away. If he was such a tough guy, why didn’t he have his own house, h-m? Why did he have to take mine? Like I said, a fake and a jerk. And what kind of a name is Phillies, I ask you? A stupid name.

Of course Ursula did not recognize me at first, I was just another homeless stray looking for a job. Although when I looked into her eyes and held my gaze, she suddenly grew speechless and kept staring into my eyes with tears rolling down her cheeks. Then she sobbed, wiped her eyes with her sleeve, turned away her gaze and told me that I could do some chores around the yard for her in exchange for food if I wanted to and I could sleep in the barn. Later that day as I was chopping wood I saw her crying in the barn. She did not recognize me but I guess I reminded her . . . of myself.

I also met Thomas and Agnes, my children. They were older than me now, good looking people, both of them, strong and cheerful. My heart went to them but I kept quiet. Both of them stared back at me for a long time. Agnes smiled to me and showed me around. My sweet daughter. Thomas was a tool maker’s apprentice, recently married. It was going to take maybe a dozen years for him to get through his apprenticeship. Those were going to be lean years but I could see that my family was ready to take it all in a stride. Agnes was a good looking, sturdy girl, easy to smile, about ready to get married with a blacksmith’s son, as I found out later. I felt very happy around Ussi, Thomas and Agnes. They did too, around me, they just had no idea why. I was definitely a big hit in that family.

Ursula had two children with her new husband now too, little Peter and Paul. They were two healthy boys running around and yelling excitedly most of the time.

Very soon Ursula was spending a lot of her time with me. For her I was a kid, younger than some of her own children, but she treated me as equal. She would confide in me sometimes. Her husband Phillies was a jerk, I was right. She was not happy with him. I just listened to her and always let her know that I heard what she said. That was enough to make her feel better.

One time Ussi sent me to the creek nearby to wash cloths. She joined me a bit later, we washed all the cloths, then started horsing around and ended up in the water, fully dressed. We splashed and laughed and chased after each other for an hour. We finally got out of the creek blue of cold with our teeth chattering. Ussi gave me a large linen sheet to dry myself and took one for herself and went deeper into the woods to change. I won—or lost—a brief but extremely intense moral struggle with myself and followed her into the brush.

I found her drying her sweet naked body with a sheet gazing at me dreamily. I just came over and stood in front of her wrapped in my sheet. I looked at her adorable body. God, how much I missed her! Sexual tension between us was so thick, you could chop it with an axe. She finally approached and started rubbing my back through my sheet, explaining in a suddenly hoarse voice that I had to be warmed up or I’d catch cold after all the swimming. She brushed her hand against my genitals through the sheet several times, then I felt her warm, eager hand inside the sheet rubbing my penis rhythmically while I was stroking her dear breasts. We were both red and breathing heavily. I figured that she was just about ready to start feeling very guilty about the whole thing and would probably send me away forever and ruin everything. So before that happened I whispered in her ear: “I love you, Ussi. I am back. It is me”. Nobody ever called her Ussi except me. Beautiful eyes suddenly large as two saucers right in front of mine. Her legs gave out and she dropped to her knees in front of me, pushing back the scream, tears streaming down her suddenly luminous face. I saw incredible anguish mixed with joy and a whole lot of love on that beautiful face. I dropped to my knees in front of her. She hugged me and held me tight to her chest while her whole body convulsed and shuddered in silent weeping. I held her as tightly as I could too. We both wept.

On the way home Ussi sang songs, her eyes were brighter than stars in the sky, she was absolutely and utterly happy. It was dark by the time we got to her house (my house, really, but not anymore), it was time for me to turn in. I could not sleep, turning and tossing on my old horse cloth in the barn, staring into the darkness thinking how things could have been when the barn gates cricked and I heard Ussi’s light steps. She climbed the ladder to the hay bay, groped around till she found me and without another word she just hugged me so very tight. We both cried quietly for a bit, then we kissed, long and sweet. In a very short while I penetrated her, rocking strongly and passionately, savoring the shudders and suppressed moans of her orgasm. It felt just like returning home to the much adored wife should feel.

Since that night, yes, you guessed it—we copulated like rabbits but in a lot more ways. That is normal with us. Too bad we only run into each other about once every thousand years or maybe a bit less. Then we spend centuries looking for each other, thinking we found each other and realizing we haven’t. All that while Ursula never remembers anything and so has no idea who or what she is always looking for. “True love” as they call it, I guess. Well, now we were finally together. . . kind of. . . for now.

I had a body of a 16-year old boy and she was a married woman with four kids, some of whom were older than me. Specifically Thomas and Agnes were older than me for the excellent reason that I was actually their father who died after they were already born so, naturally, I was born again later in time and so I was younger . . . Way too convoluted and incredible a situation to be workable. We could see that our life together was not meant to work. But for now we were lovers and sole mates again. We savored our every moment together.

Things actually worked out much better than expected. Four years passed before we were finally caught in the act by her husband. Of course there were rumors around town, of course Phillies suspected something but he never caught us. That fateful night we were making love in the barn, slow and gentle, when her old man attacked us with a pitch fork. And he would have killed us both, too. God, I hate that guy!

Although I was very preoccupied at the moment, survival instincts honed by an eternity of nearly constant trouble saved my skinny butt once again, as well as Ussi’s much nicer butt. Even before I was at all personally aware of Phillies’ presence and the pitchfork, I already grabbed Ussi, who was hopelessly lost in her sweet oblivion right that very moment, and rolled both of us a couple of feet over, outside of the pitchfork reach. I then grabbed the extended pitchfork, yanked it while kicking Phillies’ hand on the pitchfork staff. He lost his grip, the pitchfork flew out of his and my hands. I jumped at him, we both fell and started rolling around in the dark on the uneven earthen floor, kicking various implements around. Ussi finally screamed.

Phillies had at least a hundred and twenty pounds on me. It was not to my advantage to roll around with that fat hog, I needed some distance between us to utilize my agility. I was able to disengage from him, jump to my feet and kick him a few times before he got up heavily, spitting blood. Fighting naked felt weird and awkward. I punched him several times in the face while easily escaping his punches. I only succeeded in getting him more pissed off. I looked into his bloodshot eyes and I knew that he was going to kill me.

He kept trying to bear hug me but I kept evading while repeatedly punching him in the face, now slick with blood. That, unfortunately, did not seem to affect him at all. He was just too angry to care, too much adrenaline. Damn! Sooner or later he would connect and that would be the end of me. I glimpsed Ursula’s horrified very white face right when Phillies threw one of his slow, heavy punches with the right. I blocked and stepped in for an uppercut into the jaw when I suddenly stumbled in the dark on a chunk of firewood and missed. I immediately ended up in his bear hug, squeezed mightily. My attempts to break the hug, my head butts and knee kicks were all futile. My ribs cracked, vision fogged down, blood was pounding in my ears. The hog suddenly let go. It took me a second or two to come around and realize that Ussi hit him on the head with a large chunk of firewood. He was sitting on the floor now, smearing blood all over his head listlessly while Ussi recovered her dropped chuck and was getting ready to whack him again.

I staggered to my feet coughing and retching. Ussi lifted the chuck high above her head and lowered it on Phillies’ head for the second time. Her husbands slumped on the dirt floor, he was out cold but obviously breathing.

While I was laying outside sucking the air into my lungs laboriously and painfully and nursing my broken ribs, Ussi got the buggy ready, saddled one of their horses and went inside the house to see sleeping kids for the last time. We left our old house shortly after, abandoning our kids on her asshole husband. My lover’s dear face was contorted in anguish, tears streaming down her cheeks, as she looked back at her home for a long while after it was totally swallowed by the darkness behind us.

The mysterious trajectories of life do not cease to fascinate me. Phillies was not a very good man but we were the ones who actually betrayed him and ran away from the children, leaving them fully in his care. So who was the bad guy here? Me. I could master up a number of excellent defense justifications but I realized a long-long time ago that justifications were a waste of time, just words, powerless to change anything in the lives of people whom I hurt.

Thus we ran away from home in the gloom of the night, each of us boiling in our own personal Hell that we carried with us through the ages wherever we went, whether we remembered why or not.

THE FIFTH BATTALION

Back in San Francisco, laying in bed with Linda. Whew, my memories are so vivid! Linda insisted on spending the night with me. I am glad she did. Sex between us has always been wonderful. It has always been a totally natural, enjoyable and deeply satisfying experience. We tried it in all kinds of combinations over the centuries. Made no difference. Kind of puts a huge damper on all that racism and bigotry that people seem to like indulging in at times. Ha, racism! The racists were most likely just done being the other race themselves and were now getting even with their own former people for who knows what psychotic reasons. Of course Linda had no analytical idea about any of that although on some level of her awareness she always knew.

I was laying in the dark thinking, the weight of Linda’s precious head on my arm, she was breathing peacefully. Earlier that evening we put the place in order after somebody trashed it the day before. It was remarkably easy to put it all back together again, too easy. The books were picked off the shelves in blocks and deposited on the floor, the sock drawer was just turned over by the bed on the floor carefully, the arm chair was on its side in the middle of the room as if deliberately placed. Nothing was broken or damaged, nothing was missing as far as I could tell. We went through my things with Linda. The whole thing seemed staged. Why?

I had Linda put the kitchen together while I checked my secret hiding place inside the wall in the office. I had wood paneling reaching half way up the walls in the office. When I just moved in here a couple of years ago, I was looking for a good hiding place for my Black Box, as I called it. It was a black metal box, heavily built and air-tight, that contained a passport and a matching drivers license made out to someone named Augustine Molino but with my youthful picture in it, about a thousand in cash, my very old Beretta M-1934, fully loaded, and two fragmentation grenades. That was my emergency kit. Not much, I agree, but something. I removed one of the panels and made it detachable, took the drywall out and built a nesting place for my Black Box. Then put the drywall back and hung the wood panel and pushed my arm chair to it. Now I moved the arm chair, unhooked and moved over the panel, took the drywall access piece out and there was black box, pristine and unmolested.

So why was the place searched? And what the hell was up with the surveillance? The same taxi cab was parked outside the Lab when we left work earlier that day. Then I saw it parked down the street when I carefully peered through the blinds just a couple of hours ago.

Guards? Could be, although unlikely. Using the same car for surveillance was dumb and just too low-budget for the Guards. They would use a fleet of cars, electronic listening devices, hidden cameras or, most likely, if they wanted to know something, they would have just abducted me, pumped me full of drugs and got all the data they wanted . . . or so they thought. Or did they? Did they still think that? Perhaps they were no longer sure they could get the information that way. In any case, using the same car, a taxi cab, to watch me for several days was not their style.

If these were not enemies, they must be friends. My old Fifth Battalion friends. Or the Priests or the MPs. I suppose technically they were also my friends. Guars were my only enemies here on P-3. If my friends were watching me, why were they hiding from me? Albeit not doing the greatest job of it. Why wouldn’t they just approach me openly? Because they were not sure whose side I was on now. That is why. I don’t blame them.

We all knew after many tries that any escape attempts were futile. But we had to keep trying just because it was the duty of every POW to escape and wreak as much confusion as possible among the enemy in the process of doing so. That was a part of the ancient Confederacy War Code that we all swore to uphold. In other words, if we stopped trying to escape, we were subject to Court Marshal if we ever succeeded in presenting ourselves for the trial. But of course the accomplished fact of presenting ourselves for the trial would have meant that we had escaped which would have absolved us of any charges by the Court Marshal. So, the bottom line, we couldn’t stop trying. And who wanted to live in this dump anyway? Earth and its people definitely have their own charm and beauty—often in a psychotic kind of way—and it was interesting how it all was going to turn out but come on!

I got up quietly, got dressed in the dark and went to the kitchen. There I found a piece of plastic and a piece of aluminum foil. Some plastics, when they burn, create really foul smelling fumes, especially at the moment when they just start burning or when you smother the fire. A piece of such plastic, loosely wrapped in foil that restricts the oxygen flow, is not allowed to burn freely thus stinking mightily. That is a so called Stink Bomb, just for laughs, really. I sneaked out of the house through the back door, walked around the block and approached the cab from behind keeping in deep shadows. There were two people in the cab, one sleeping, one watching my apartment building entrance, presumably. The cab window was rolled down. I squirted my bomb with lighter fluid that I brought with me, lighted it up. Wafts of black noxious smoke enveloped the bomb as I tossed it inside the cab. Accompanied by muffled curses, coughing, sounds of commotion and the engine starting, I just walked across the street calmly and entered my apartment building through the front entrance, took the stairs to my apartment and got undressed. I looked outside, the cab was gone. I stretched next to sleeping Linda, dear warmth of her body penetrating all through me, melting my anger and sorrow away. I closed my eyes feeling altogether better about myself and the world in general.

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That must have happened about 8200 years ago. Give or take a few. We landed some place in Himalayas to set up a Base for the main contingents of the Fifth Invader Force. Our outfit full title for that reason was the Avant-garde Battalion of the Fifth Invaders Force. In official communications we were addressed as the “A5^th” or ”A5B”. We would supposedly go in first, set up and secure the Base and a safety perimeter around it and do any needed recon and minimal fortifications for the rest of the troops.

Who knows why we wanted this planet. And who cared? It was all the same to me. I was just a Gunnery Corporal, my interests in life did not encompass questioning the Command intentions. I was just your regular valorous Confederacy soldier to the core. More specifically, I was as gluttonous, hell raising, womanizing, lazy and cowardly as the next guy. Our motto in life was “Away from the Commanding Officer and toward the kitchen!”

My actual assigned duty title had a rather manly ring to it, I thought: Lancer Gun Crew In-Charge. Girls liked it. We were assigned to a Surface Crawler, I had a turret with a Lancer gun under my command and a crew of three. We never saw real action but we sure had fun firing that crazy thing at our training and demonstrations. We were supposed to be able to fully set it up, aim, fire, adjust the aim, fire again and so on and finally destroy any target within range in under two minutes. We were still honing it down to get it in under sixteen minutes. Meanwhile—what can I say? The enemy would just have to wait to be blown to pieces by our Lancer gun, that’s all.

We only spent a couple of months on P-3, or Earth as we call it now, before we were instantaneously wiped out, all two thousand of us, in a rather gory but efficient manner. Our General Brell, the Commanding Officer of A5B, going by the intel data he had, ordered us to set up camp pretty high in the mountains but on a low spot, in a small valley surrounded by huge rock protrusions and grassy knolls. The intel data indicated that the planet was populated by technologically undeveloped humanoids who had no explosive weaponry, no biological or chemical weapons, no nuclear or energy flow weapons, no electromagnetic vibe machines, no fast-moving or flying vehicles of any kind, no communications, no roads and no stable social order to be of any danger to the mission. So Brell’s main concern was concealment. He did not expect any attack other than by ground forces armed with swards and spears—as the absolute worse case scenario. We were heavily armed as per the Code of War but we were not supposed to fight with the locals, it was not supposed to be that type of an invasion. We were only supposed to support the subsequent business development and mining operations. Of course as a Gunnery Corporal I did not know any of this at the time, I was only briefed some 5000 years later before one of our many failed escape attempts.

We all worked 12-hour construction shifts building bunkers and digging tunnels. The work shifts were followed by four-hour guard duty and the rest of the time was pretty much unassigned.

At the time I was madly in love with one of the female traffic coordinators from Signals by the name Zee. I had a hard-on the size of Big Dipper, or so it felt. What indecent and reprehensible daydreams were induced by her cherubic lips, modest hips and full breasts! I was advised that Zee, the object of my adoration, was a sophisticated type and very anal. My futile attempts to score with her in various uncharacteristic for me sophisticated ways finally prompted me to just approach her off-duty, brief her on my hard-on situation and ask her point-blank if she would like to have sex with me up in the hills on the grass. She stared at me rather angrily and said, “Absolutely not. Your advances are bothering me, I feel hunted. Leave me alone.”

A pretty definite “No”, wasn’t it? Well, it wasn’t. Women! I know, I’ve been there—on both sides of the ramparts. The trick is to watch their eyes.

“Oh, I am really sorry, Zee, didn’t mean to offend you.” And I honestly didn’t. Her eyes softened. “I just really wanted to kiss your lips . . . for a long time . . .”, her eyes softening and misting over, “very long time . . . and then kiss you all over . . . your other lips . . .” her stare hardened, there was that anger again, “but really I just like you a lot and wanted to cuddle with you . . . if you let me.”

She said yes. War is Hell, I always say, but it has its moments.

We never made it to the hills. While we were walking away from the Base holding hands and conversing amicably, a wave of utterly unreal in its intensity pain suddenly washed over me. A laud grinding sound drowned our cries of agony. I momentarily felt very rapid vibration, kind of like an electric shock of sorts that started tearing my body to pieces, pulverizing it within seconds into red mist. I bailed out of the body dizzy, blinded and disoriented right after the first few instants of pain.

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Electromagnetic vibe machines are disgustingly brutal and non-discriminate weapons, they just pulverize everything alive in range and cause serious harm and birth defects even well outside the range perimeter. Mutations in humans and animals prompted a complete ban on the use of these weapons by the intergalactic community but they were still used by warring sides when they believed they could get away with it. Their only savior in such cases was complete annihilation of all witnesses and obliteration of any remains and residues. Of course people themselves are indestructible. I am not talking about the meat primate bodies or any other types of bodies that people use. I am talking about people. Call them spirits, souls, Astral bodies, ghosts or Rockford cheese. It makes no difference what you call them—you, me, all of us. That which every one of us recognizes as him or herself, that which we mean when we say “I”, is indestructible and immortal. So nothing can REALLY affect us except if we believe it can. Therefore, there are always witnesses who could never be killed. But they could be usually made to forget, difficulties in accomplishing that notwithstanding.

This terrible weapon was not used often as it required complicated setups, which consisted essentially of building and powering up three terminals around the target area. Somebody managed to set it all up right under our noses and wipe us all out. Somebody on our side was criminally negligent or working on their own agenda. That somebody may or may not have been a part of A5B but the most obvious scapegoat was of course our CO General Brell.

Naturally, General Brell was now a wanted criminal with the Confederate MPs periodically trying to find him ever since. We had an MP platoon assigned to our Battalion. A small cohort of Brell’s closest officers have been hiding and protecting him. They called themselves “The Priests”. They swore allegiance to the General long before we landed here, they were his staff officers. They claimed he was innocent in the death of the Battalion and failure of the entire Fifth Invaders operation. Well, they may have been right on that point since they, unlike me, had all the facts at their disposal and, therefore, could draw intelligent conclusions.

Of course, Law dictated otherwise. Brell was doomed. I am not a huge believer in any justice system anyway because it is based on the principle of impartiality of the Judges. The whole idea of being impartial never set well with me. Impartiality was invented to circumvent the fact that nobody around could really be trusted or even taught to pass sane judgments. So honestly, it did not get all my knickers tied in a bunch that Brell was escaping Justice. What did I care? What would his apprehension change for me or for anybody else, for that matter? Nothing at all. With him around we at least had something like a leader here on P-3.

THE LAB

Morning arrived with birds chirping outside and the usual cheerful kisses from Linda followed by energetic love making. Life was not so bad after all. I had Linda, I had Yvette, I still had my job and some fun game was developing out there with the taxi number 3415 stalking me. What else does a man need to be fully happy? Just some kind of purpose and direction, I suppose. Well, I will just have to keep working on that. Nobody else is going to give me any purpose and direction in life, I will just have to figure out something interesting myself.

We fed Yvette together, we always enjoyed the procedure. Most people think that Sparrows eat bread crumbs and grain, the carbohydrates. Not so. They mainly eat insects, i.e. the protein, and also vegetable matter. Although, Yvette would never frown upon a good helping of bread crumbs either. So every morning I, or Linda and I together, prepare a plate of proteins, fruits and veggies and a carbs for Yvette for the day, which all together comprises an approximately a sixteen-course meal that would put a traditional Italian dinner to shame. Every morning we fine-cut tiny quantities of spinach, lattice, apple, beans, broccoli, bock-choi, plums, any other fruits and vegetables, then various cheeses, meats and fish. Linda introduced Yvette to Brussels sprouts that were a big hit. I am okay with Brussels sprouts, much easier on my pocket than crab meat that Yvette also happens to like. The food preparation procedure takes 15-20 minutes. Yvette loves it. She is usually jumping all over the cutting board inspecting the food, trying a bit of this, a bit of that, complaining loudly if pieces are too large, cleaning her beak on my thumb excitedly and generally being in the center of attention. The slanderous nonsense that birds poop everywhere all the time is entirely unfounded. Well, okay, not entirely entirely.

Linda and I walked to the Lab hand in hand, gentle smile on her face. I saw some people gawking at us disapprovingly here and there. Probably thinking “Oh, no, an interracial couple! How shocking!” Get off of it, you bums!

The work at the Lab was interesting. Our Chinua Laboratories won a military research grant having to do with molecular bonding for the purpose of developing new forms of armor. Scientists here on P-3 have not yet discovered the way to make real armor where a layer of polymer material of about 1/16” would vastly outperform steel-plate armor 16” thick. Molecular bonding.

It would seem to an uninitiated observer that since I had a significantly longer life track at my disposal and could remember my previous experience to about the same degree as anybody else remembers various events of their current lifetime, I would be a well of wisdom, a genius, a towering Giant of Knowledge with gilded feet, perhaps, or at least another Einstein. I wish! Do you remember your school physics or chemistry worth a nickel? Would you be able to answer coherently a simple question, such as how and why, let’s say, two extremely volatile gases, such as oxygen and hydrogen, when bonded, create a stable substance called “water” that does not boil at room temperature? Do you remember why that is? But you sure remember something from your college curriculum. I also remember something but not very much, just little bits and pieces.

We, the ever-decreasing contingent of remaining conscious A5B officers and crew, have been plotting and attempting escape from this planet for over eight millennia. There were only two venues—either with the body on a spaceship, or in a disembodied state by overwhelming the protective screening. Thus far our uniformly unsuccessful attempts have been made in disembodied form. That entailed attacking and taking off line any one of the three Implant Stations protective screening equipment. We managed to destroy the Pyrenees station hundreds In order to try it with a body we would need an operational spaceship. A strategy not entirely without shortcomings, considering that Earth science was yet to produce an engine that would not require a freight train of fuel just for the take off, a viable armor instead of ceramic tile, directional energy flow weapons, sufficiently powerful and with no recoil, protective energy screens and also maneuverability. Listen, so called “Earth scientists” use nuclear energy to boil water, need I say more? Stone Age! The only functional components that Earth could offer to us as of very recently were computer technology and the life support system.

Our Battalion boys have been doing their best to push things forward. Tesla, for example, was a much greater scientist than Einstein and, unlike Einstein’s calculations and conclusions, his were actually correct. Speed of light is not the limit. How far would we get without our Highlander drive that could top speed of light a thousand times over. Of course, Tesla had is easy. Just as most of us, he was just struggling to remember long-forgotten school stuff. We tried to push things forward the best we could. We were doing a remarkably shoddy job of it although things have begun moving forward a bit better now.

To get the job at the Lab with no verifiable education beyond high school, I had to spring at Mr. Pettit at Starbucks “accidently”, utilizing intel data collected for me by our guys, make some small talk and tell him among other things that quantum chemistry, especially molecular bonding, was my passion and my hobby and that in my spare time I was working on exact application of the Shrodinger Equation to Quantum Chemistry and in my opinion, the Imaginary Unit “i” was nothing but an energy function of extremely fine wave length not yet attainable by Earth science. Mr. Pettit looked at me wide eyed and immediately offered me a minimum wages Technician position at the Lab as was commensurate with my education and experience.

But you see, I was telling the truth and I knew I was right. Our armor in the old days had something to do with electronic bonding on molecular level. Electrons behave as both energy and matter. They have both wavelength and mass. That is the fact that laid foundation for both Quantum Physics and Quantum Chemistry and that is the direction where the solution for viable spaceship armor was to be found.

There were several problems to solve here, it would take at least ten years, probably more, including all the verifications and testing. So if I kept my nose clean and paid attention I was guaranteed to have a job for at least ten years while also helping the Cause.

My boss, Mr. Pettit, came to inspect my work several times today. He finally explained that he received a report from one of my co-workers that my work was much improved now and my performance in providing timely service to the researchers was nothing short of commendable. The report was from Linda, of course, so he wanted to see the changed me with his own eyes. Everybody knew that Linda adored me and we were lovers. Mr. Pettit liked what he saw and even called me “my dear” at parting.

Today Linda and I had lunch in the café at the corner. They had chicken and mushrooms crepes to die for. Better than IHOP’s. Linda was very happy and cheerful. It was a good lunch.

The proprietor, an Iranian man by the name Farzad or Frankie, as I called him, waved to me and came over to ask if everything was okay. We exchanged some polite pleasantries. Franky told me conversationally that a gentleman stopped by this morning for breakfast. He was asking for a reliable computer geek. Farzad recommended me, of course. Puffing out his chest proudly and pouching his fat lips, Frankie extracted a piece of paper from his enormous pants and handed it to me. It had the customer’s address on it. The note read: “A5B Sulindu St., 9PM. Mr. Cedu”.

“Thank you very much, Frankie. What did this man look like?”

“Just a regular guy—white, bolding, not very tall, about 40, a bit overweight, neatly dressed. Oh, yeah, he had a grasshopper button on his jacket. Kind of strange. You know those round buttons with pictures?”

“Yeah, I get the idea. Thanks again, Frank, much appreciated.”

It was not a grasshopper, it must have been a praying mantises, our ancient WAIT AND POUNCE symbol as well as the password. The message was clear enough. It was one of our A5B guys trying to meet me. I guess they were tired of watching me and did not relish the idea of another stink bomb attack and just went for a much straighter approach—albeit not completely straight. And Mr. Cedu did not happen to leave the building number, either. And, furthermore, I never heard of Sulindu Street either. But the word itself was vaguely familiar. Sulindu . . . sulindu . . . Wait a minute, I got it now. This word was similar to the old Standard term for a self-adjusting ignition mechanism for a rocket, what was it? XJC-something, 152 or something. But that was “silundi”. Okay, that’s close enough but what was that about? I read the note again. “A5B Sulindu St., 9PM. Mr. Cedu”. What else did I remember about silundi? It was an optic device, basically, it had to do with light. It had a rather large diamond as it’s main component. Diamond? The Diamond Street? Even if so, how do I find this Mr. Cedu? Then the last name “Cedu” must also be a code. I looked it up on my cell phone. CEDU stood for 2338. Okay, let’s try 2338 Diamond at 9PM tonight.

After lunch Linda came over asking if I wanted to beg her to please spend the night with me again. There was so much affection in her beautiful eyes that I just asked her obediently if she would please spend this night with me again. She rolled her eyes and said she’d think about it and walked away. Then she ran right back, whispered “Yes” and “I love you, Picky”, gave me a sizzling look and a peck on a cheek. Linda . . . Adorable as usual.

After work on the way home Linda kissed me and asked if she could come with me to fix the computer for Mr. Cedu. I talked her out of it, obviously, computers are boring and all that. In all honesty, the only reason I did not want her at our little get-together with the Battalion boys was that the discussion subject matter would seem pure insanity to any one-lifer, such as Linda.

First we took a cab and went right to Pacific Heights, of course. I asked the driver to follow Market, then turn right on Diamond. Number 2338 was a house that looked similar to any other house in that neighborhood. There was hill behind it so the next street over was at significantly higher elevation. There was also a four-story apartment building next block over which, naturally, had a roof, a flat roof . . .

I could not explain what the taxi ride was about. She must have chocked it off to my general weirdness and stopped asking questions. It was not such a long ride anyway.

Then we went home for our quality time together. Linda was a one-lifer, a mortal. We call them “one-lifers” although of course there is no such thing. There is absolutely no way for a being to die, it is impossible. We are not made of meat, we are more akin to thought, we are units of thought. We are simply not alive in the conventional sense of the word, so we cannot die in the conventional sense of the word. Spirit “dies” in various ways as a matter of semantics but it is nothing permanent. We all live forever. Some of us, however, cannot remember any other lives, confuse themselves with their bodies and honestly believe themselves to be animals who evolved directly from Charles Darwin or some other hairy beast. This moronic confusion was induced hypnotically under considerable duress, it is not at all a natural viewpoint for any of us to hold true.

One life? It is factually inaccurate to such a degree as to make it utterly stupid. It is kind of like believing that when you buy a new car you come into existence as a steel creature that evolved through the ages from a bicycle or a lawn mower. How could anybody believe in anything that moronic? Well, somebody, for a good enough reason, made one-lifers believe that by sheer force and torture. Those who did it, who took the eternity away from billions of beings and turned them into monkeys, are the same people who destroyed our A-Fifth Battalion and who hold us captive here—the Guards. This P-3 planet is just an Imperial prison and the Guards are simply low paid government employees doing their job.

Alright then, so we tried to colonize a planet P-3, Earth, which totally unexpectedly to us turned out to be Murabian prison facility. Common sense to the contrary, we attempted to break into a jail. And we sure broke into it! And we sure have not been able to break out! How stupid could we be? Brell probably deserved whatever it was the MPs wanted to do to him.

Yvette hated to be left alone for a whole day, she liked company. As soon as we walked in, Yvette flew over, sat on Linda’s shoulder and gave her best scolding tirade straight into Linda’s ear. Linda started cooing to her as if to a child, quite successfully apparently, because Yvette soon knocked off cussing and was chirping to Linda happily, jumping around and turning this way and that on Linda’s shoulder—probably just showing off as usual.

THE GUARDS

I rocketed out of the body in absolute shock. I dimly perceived my body being pulverized by the electromagnetic vibration. The girl’s body had been pulverized next to mine. Oh, no! What a God-awful waste! I could perceive her shock and utter horror. I was surrounded by hundreds of beings all terrified and crying out in agony. I briefly saw a bright light and felt an imposing and stabilizing presence of General Brell. He emanated strength and confidence. I calmed down somewhat. It was not the first time I died violently, no reason to wallow in self-pity and beautiful sadness of it all now. There will be plenty more chances to shoot a Lancer gun. I could possibly even get it in under two minutes eventually. I would definitely have sizzling sex with beautiful women and do other things again. And again. And again. Of course loosing my young body and my friends was a terribly disappointing loss, as such things usually are, but not the end of the world, so to speak. I did not know even half of it! Next instant we have all been pulled straight up as if by a current. It was a “flow”, I knew how it was done. Somebody simply created a tiny wavelength energy flow. We, the souls, are electrically charged somewhat. We start resisting the flow by generating our own electrical charge but only succeed in charging and increasing the strength of the flow. The more you fight, the stronger the pull, in other words. This could not possibly be good. We were being captured as spirits. It could only mean one thing: we were on our way to the enemy implant station.

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Well, we have obviously been attacked, totally wiped out, in fact. So my conclusion about this being an enemy action at the time was not ungrounded. Let me explain the Implant Station concept.

You know, we are only talking about spirits here, the ghosts, the souls—whatever you want to call yourself—not the bodies. So how do you force an immortal spiritual entity to forfeit its spiritual nature? To forget all the events of the past? How do you make someone give up their immortality? How do you convince a being that it is nothing but a baboon, a perishable red meat body? How do you pave the way for the incredible degradation, wars and crime that we are so accustomed to here? I’ll tell you how. By hypnosis administered under incredible pain and overwhelming duress, that is how. This treatment is used all over the Universe in jails against most dangerous people, the Non-Conformists, whose crimes warranted the ultimate capital punishment, the Forever Dead verdict. The charge of non-conformity is never leveled lightly. To get in that much trouble you must have truly convinced everybody that you were an absolute basket case. You could have been a violent criminal, a sexual deviant, a subversive or a revolutionary, a recidivist income tax cheater or a religious extremist. You just wouldn’t conform, would you? You just had to keep on cheating on your income tax, didn’t you? You probably still do! Well, so now you are just dumped on some off-the-beaten-pass planet, such as P-3, with all consciousness of your true spiritual nature more or less wiped out and replaced with a very simple set of moronic commands and inner conflicts to keep you dumb and introverted, and left here to take care of your body forever, the One-Lifer, the animal. It is just an absolute tragedy on one hand but then again, I don’t know anybody else here on P-3—except the two thousand of us war prisoners—who were dumped here without a trial. The guards did not create laws and did not pass verdicts. The Law was allowed to take its due course. The Murabi Imperial Law or Espinol Confederacy Law—what’s the difference? You keep making life difficult for others long enough—they will eventually get rid of you. Did everybody here deserve such a fate, in my opinion? I don’t think so but unfortunately I am not the Jury or the Judge.

I kiss Linda, my dearest one-lifer, sudden premonition clouding her darling eyes as she kisses me goodbye. As it turned out, leaving Linda out of this temporarily was a very good thing to do, although for her that only postponed the nightmare that followed.

I walk out into the chilling wind. It is dark already. Black, sticky clouds are congregating palpably over my head, turning into something sinister, almost undead, reaching for me blindly with their tentacles of darkness. Gloomy. Dreadful. Repulsive. Heralds of impending doom. The neighbors black cat, my Yvette’s worst enemy, runs across my path. With a heavy heart I fire up my ancient VW Rabbit and clunker off into the unknown shrouded in clouds of black diesel smoke.

CHAPTER TWO

TARGET ACQUISITION

At 7:15 I parked my Rabbit in one of the empty covered parking stalls at the very end of parking lot of an apartment building on 17th. The car was reasonably well-concealed next to the garbage enclosure. Nobody has been watching me as far as I could tell. It is not just that I have not seen anybody on my tail, I did not feel watched. So far so good.

The four-story apartment building had no fire escape. There were walkways on the second, third and fourth floors with all the doors facing the walkways. I went up the stairs to the fourth floor, walked unhurriedly to the end of the walkway, climbed up on the guardrail, reaching the edge of the roof fascia with my fingertips and pulled myself up on the roof making as little noise as possible.

Nobody on the roof. There was a large maintenance structure in the middle of the roof. I walked around it. I was alone. Having gotten up onto the roof of the maintenance structure, I settled at the edge facing toward Diamond and took my binoculars out.

It was a dark and cloudy evening, perfect for covert operations. Was anybody else having themselves a covert operation here tonight? Well, let’s have a look. I looked. From my vantage position I could see the rooftops of several single family houses across the back yard of the apartment building I was on, redwood decks sporting inevitable lemon trees in wooden barrel planters, birdfeeders hanging in front of windows. I could see Diamond street beyond and houses lining up the other side of it. I found number 2338, the bronze numerals large and prominent in the even glow of the street light.

2338 Diamond was a rather mundane looking two-story Craftsman with somewhat ornate wood trim and siding, not freshly painted, some lights in the windows, nothing suspicious. However, moving in with no intel, I simply had to assume that the territory was hostile. First Rule of engagement is “Always approach from elevated position”. Hence, the roof.

No, I guess it is really the Second Rule. No, actually it is even the Third Rule. The First Rule is to stay out of trouble altogether. Driving back home and spending a quiet evening with Linda would neatly fall under the First Rule of hostile action. The Second Rule is “Always yield to superior fire power”. Since I wasn’t even armed, spending a quiet evening with Linda would neatly fall under the Second Rule, too. Spending a quiet evening with Linda would neatly fall under both the First and the Second rule. Just kidding, there are no such rules of engagement, they are just too reasonable for any engagement. I just made them up.

I checked Diamond up and down as much as I could through my binoculars. There was the cab that was stalking me before. Check. A “correctly included” item. Any vans? Yes, there was van a bit up the hill from 2338. Up the hill? “Always approach from elevated position”. An out-point. I scanned the street again—within my limited field of vision. There he was, a homeless man all tucked-in in a doorway a couple of houses down the street. Would you let a homeless man leave at your doorstep and use it as a bathroom? Of course not. And was that a black Crown-Victoria parked a block away? What was that about? The Feds? Concatenation of outpoints, a seething snake pit of disastrous omens. I bet I’d find a few more outpoints across the street from number 2338, on the closest to me side of Diamond, hidden from me at the moment. The house was clearly under surveillance and set up for heavy action. By whom? The Feds? Feds were not my enemies. I am not a non-conformist. I happen to like governments and the rule of Law. My only enemies are the guards.

The guards are invariably recruited from heavy-gravity planets, much heavier than P-3. That made the guards stand out to a trained eye, easy to spot. All you had to do was look for squat heavy-set dudes with enormously thick necks, powerful torsos, short, chunky legs and alert, sober eyes and you had yourself a guard. You could also tell them by the weapons they favored. They had to blend in so they used the weapons of the era. At this juncture swards and spears were out, guns were in. Well, these chunky monkeys could not fit their fat fingers around any handgun trigger. They usually carried modified revolvers with the finger guard sawed off and a safety catch added to prevent accidental discharge. I heard they were beginning to carry Glocks, too, a much better weapon. Among automatic weapons they favored Portuguese Lusa A-2’s or Israeli Uzi’s, similarly modified.

Should just go, inspect the van or Crown-Vic, I thought to myself. See what else I’d scare up here. There is just too much data here and not enough to tie it together, all at the same time. And I am not armed. Yeah, there is much to be said for family comfort.

Crown-Vic can wait. I focused my binoculars on the porch of the rendezvous house. No doormat, no shoes sitting outside on the porch, no newspapers, no Chinese food flyers, no potted plants, no firewood—I could see nothing on that porch. Did people live there? Or did people die there? I glanced at my watch—7:48.

I heard steps below me on the graveled roof. I waited in the dark until I saw a man walking purposefully toward the edge of the roof facing Diamond Street. He was wearing battle black, large letters FBI on his Kevlar back, openly carrying a sniper rifle, a standard Heckler & Koch PSG1 as far as I could tell. He was not particularly heavily built. He mumbled something unintelligible, presumably to his Command and took horizontal firing position at the roof parapet—exactly by the book: rifle set up, body at a 30-degree angle, legs apart. I bet he had the entrance door to 2338 in his scope. I reached into my pocket and carefully extracted my cell phone, took out the back panel, disconnected the battery and stuffed all the pieces into my pocket.

It started drizzling. The neighborhood was as quiet as it ever gets this time of day, probably—a few cars, even fewer pedestrians, an old guy walking his old Corgi. Then a beat up blue Ford Focus pulled up in front of 2338 with a Domino’s pizza sign set on the roof. Delivery man, a young guy in Domino’s uniform and with a stack of pizzas in a leather bag, walked up the entrance door and rang the bell. The door opened. I strained to see the person who opened the door but no such luck. The delivery man walked in, the door closed. How long does it take to take the pizza boxes out and get paid? A minute? Two minutes? I waited patiently. A silver Camry double parked next to the delivery car. A passenger transferred from Camry to the driver’s seat of the Focus and drove off. Camry pulled out after it. I guess no point waiting for the delivery driver anymore. Time—8:14.

The sniper below and not even twenty feet from my position suddenly mumbled something urgent into his headphone, got up with his rifle and keeping away from the maintenance building walked around it, looking toward the point where he came from. I guess he had a ladder there. I looked too. There was another guy hurriedly getting up on the roof, an older guy, not particularly powerfully built either. He was looking directly at me, it seemed. I looked at the sniper. He had his rifle pointed in my direction now. They could not have possibly seen me and they still have not seen me. But they knew I was here and they were cutting me off.

“Hey! Up on the roof, get down with your hands where I can see them! You have nowhere to run!”

I lifted my body on all four, pushed forward and jumped down at him, using the weight of my rather small body to knock him down. He did not expect such agility, I knocked him off his feet and we rolled on the roof. I heard the other Fed running around the maintenance structure heavily on the graveled roof. Having temporarily disabled the sniper’s right arm by a punch into the shoulder pressure pint, a very precise and well executed, I might add, I managed to get one into his throat. I got on my feet while he was wriggling on the roof fighting for his next breath. Suddenly a red dot of a laser scope appeared right in the middle of his forehead. His head jerked back hitting the roof, eyes lost their focus and closed as the sniper slumped dead right at my feet. I did not hear the shot but I knew it must have come from a higher point to my right. A glance in that direction confirmed my guess—there was a tiny prick of red light reaching in my direction for a more elevated position, must be a roof top a couple of streets over. The red light of the sniper scope was not reaching for me, though.

“Freeze!” I heard the yell of the second Fed now in position. Then I heard the sound of gravel shuffle as if somebody was stumbling around in small circles, then body fell and everything went silent again. I did not have to look to know that the second cop was just as dead as the first one. I searched the dead sniper and pulled out his cell phone, his Glock and his wallet. The dead agent’s name was James Burk. He did not have much money in his wallet. Then I walked over to the second dead man and read his driver’s license. Frank Silezny.

I found myself smack in the middle of a war again. What else is new? There is always war, probably because they are never boring. Okay. I was armed with the Glock now. Finances, communication lines and weapons are three of the five pillars of any successful military operation—and probably any business operation, too, for that matter, the only difference being equipment and tools instead of weapons. The other two pillars were personnel and intelligence data. Personnel was just me and I had no intel whatsoever, not a clue. And I was very low on cash, I only had a few bucks on me plus Agent Burns’ wallet. I looked at my watch—8:31. The party was supposed to start at nine but I already had so much fan, and it wasn’t even nine yet!

I heard more Feds or cops (same thing to me, really) down on the street, sirens blaring, tires and brakes screeching. The cops were here in force. I ran to the edge of the roof and jumped to the balcony walkway right below me. Having recovered my balance I found myself looking at an apartment door with a number “416” on it. Hide inside? There was a large window next to the door. I could see a sparsely furnished living room beyond. Crucifixion painting occupied most of the far wall of the living room. Christ was clearly suffering but, unlike me, he seemed fully cognizant of what was going on. A pretty Latina, obviously pregnant, fear in her eyes, rushed out of her living room when she saw me. I decided against entering the life of people living here and getting anybody in trouble.

I walked down the 4th floor walkway calmly and then down the stairs. There were several police cars, an ambulance and even a fire track for some reason down in the parking lot but the most interesting vehicle was an idling SFPD cruiser with the driver’s door wide open right by the curb below me. My ride—facing the wrong way, unfortunately. The driveway entrance was partially blocked by the fire track but I had a clear shot through the lawn over the curbs. Would have to do that obstacle course in reverse.

There were cops on the 2^nd floor landing guns drawn, apprehending a Mexican guy or just talking to him, sometimes you can’t tell. I excused myself and smiled as I approached the group calmly, squeezing between the older of the cops and the railing, keeping both cops and the Mexican to my left and the railing to my right. The older cop glanced at me blankly enough as I was walking by, obviously preoccupied, but an instant later with a sudden shock of realization the cop’s lips started forming a sound, an alarm call perhaps, while his shoulders squared in front of me and his right hand shot down to his gun. I pushed him hard toward the others with my shoulder, cleared the handrail in one motion and flew down into the bushes. There was plenty of light to see the landing spot. The way I was coming down I would hit two large evergreens. I turned my body 90 degrees mid-air, aiming for the clear spot between them and landed squarely between the bushes. Screaming. A shot fired. Fast response time, damn these cops. Hole in the windshield in front of me. I squeeze a few quick ones with my Glock in all directions just to keep the cops at bay, jump into the cruiser. Reverse. Tires screeching. Knock something down. Another shot. More shots. Another hole in the windshield. Very bumpy coming over the curbs. Steering wheel hard right. More screeching. Shift to drive. I am out.

Zigzagging through the city I quickly make it to Duboice and Van Ness, drive under the overpass and ditch the police car. I reverse my jacket from black to orange, pull the hood over my head. It was raining a bit, nothing suspicious.

I was walking slowly down Van Ness Avenue thinking. Usual heavy traffic, several police cars, sirens blaring, lots of foot traffic. I was nearing Tenderloin, the best part of town to get mugged or killed—or hide. I could take a right on any of these streets, Jones or Turk or whichever, and get lost in Tenderloin rather successfully, hole up in one of the cheap hostels. It was still drizzling.

I went to Mel’s Diner and ordered some desert. I felt safe enough at a table in the corner keeping both entrances under observation. I just needed a place to think. But first I checked my finances. My sniper came to work to shoot somebody tonight with twenty-eight dollars in his wallet. Daddy went to work. Just a job. Wife probably told him to stop at a store on the way home and grab some milk and bread or something. He was dead on the roof now, killed by some other sniper who was also just doing his job, I am sure. Hey, a guy just got to make a living, right? What kind of living did James Burk make? He was dead on the roof. And what about the sniper who shot him? He’d be dead too, I’ll see to that.

It may seem at first that somebody helped me by killing two FBI agents that were onto me. In truth, it was no help at all, it was a set up. I have not actually done anything wrong except resisting arrest but now I was a cop killer—not for very long, though. The expertise will show that the bullets were fired from a high power rifle but that would take several hours. Why did anybody want me off-balance for several hours? Obviously, somebody wanted something from me. I would gladly give it away just for asking if I knew what it was. Did it have anything at all to do with the mysterious search in my apartment the other day? Obviously. Otherwise it would have just been a co-incidence. There are no co-incidences. Two people just died. How was Linda going to survive through this? She was at my place and she was truly vulnerable and had no idea about anything. And it was rather easy to get to me through her.

Many aspects of the situation were not clear but there were some facts that I could possibly build upon. I could rely on the fact that none of our A5B guys would kill FBI agents unless specifically attacked. Just not our style, we are simply not non-conformists, we do not kill cops as tactical means to a strategic end. The second fact was that I was in serious trouble at the moment with an All-Points Bulletin on me, the APB, probably being sent out to all Bay Area law enforcement agencies. For now I was considered a cop killer, armed and dangerous. And it was true, I was armed but I was never very dangerous unless cornered. I was not cornered yet.

What else did I know? Somebody raided my apartment and dumped contents of all my drawers on the floor as if looking for something. But I could tell that the perpetrator’s heart wasn’t into it. The place was not really trashed and nothing of any value was missing, otherwise I’d notice. What if instead of looking for something, the person who trashed the place actually hid something in my apartment? And now somebody else, not our Battalion guys, were after that thing?

What else did I know? The only enemies we had here were the guards. Very true. Regretfully enough, however, the guards were not non-conformists either. They were not particularly evil or cruel. It would never occur to any of them to kill my bird, for example. They were not after money or power, they did not want to intimidate anybody particularly or gain any respect—nobody even knew they existed. They were simply enforcing the status-quo. Killing two FBI agents and Yvette just to get to me was simply out of character for them and devoid of any plausible motive. So who else could it be? The usual players were the guards, MP’s, Brell with the Priests and the rest of the officers and crew of A5B. None of them could have killed two agents in cold blood to get to me. And why me? Couldn’t they find somebody a little less mediocre and depressed than me? It just didn’t make any sense at all.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how lost I really was. My head started aching. Thinking was not my forte anyway. I am better at action where I just act and do very little thinking hoping it all comes out alright somehow. More fun that way.

Action, yeah! First of all, I had to warn Linda. They could not have gotten to her yet, there was still time for her to get out and temporarily disappear. That would not just save her some unknown as yet amount of trouble, but would disarm the opposition in a major way. Where the cops gone?

I took out the FBI agent’s cell phone and dialed home. Linda picked up on the second ring.

“Hi Picky! Are you all done yet, honey? I am lonely here, come home!” I heard Linda’s cooing voice.

“Yes, sweetie, I am all done but . . . Change in plans. I want you to get out of the house right now and drive to the place we met a month ago on Saturday, remember? This is an emergency.”

Linda started asking something but I cut her off, I did not want her to say the name of the place or waste time on questions. “Go now! No delays. Take Yvette with you. Everything is okay, just do it FAST!”

Linda again started asking something but suddenly stopped. I heard her yell with the received away from her now, “Hey, who are you? How did you get in here? Out immediately! I am calling the police!”

“Put down the phone ma’am.” Men’s voice some distance away from Linda, “We are the police. Put the phone down now!”

“Show me the badge! I have police on line here! Show me the damn badge right now!” There was panic in Linda’s voice now. Who and what exactly was she looking at?

“Take it easy, ma’am. Just calm down. Give me the phone!”

Then another voice, more muffled, probably further away from Linda. I only heard bits a pieces “. . . help . . . Susie? . . . unplug damn . . . secure. . . woman . . . started on the kitchen!”

“Show your badges right now!” Linda was screaming now. Sounds of struggle. Other voices in the background, some commands, some responses. Some intonations sounded like a phone or radio conversation a bit at a distance. Couldn’t make it out except the name Charley. Line went dead. Linda!

Too late . . . Linda! Damn!

Damn, Linda was in a hip of trouble now—all because of me. That also meant that she was safe for now if they wanted something from me. I sure felt more cornered now and more dangerous. I needed to get moving but I still did not know what was going on. Hey, I am really weak on intel over here! Somebody give me something to grab on to, fast!

I heard the enemy’s voices on the phone. What an incredible stroke of fate, what an invaluable opportunity to solve the puzzle. Let’s see what new intel have I actually gleaned from those few seconds of the phone contact. The first man’s voice was calm but commanding, well-trained, belonged to a white man, no accent, uncertain age but obviously he was not a kid and not yet an old man. Not SFPD or FBI. No way could they have traced me so fast. Nobody was showing Linda any badges, either. Possibly military. And who was Susie? The second man, clearly the first one’s superior, mentioned the name Susie. Was there another woman with them? I did not hear any other female voices. I heard other male voices in the apartment before the line went dead, minimally two more men. The actual words were unclear but I was fairly certain they were commands and also I heard a phone or radio report. “Secure the woman”, possibly? Weird. “Secure the woman.” And I thought I caught the name “Charley”. Charlie who? And Susie? Most unlikely that they’d call each other by their real names because they clearly were not police. They were committing a crime, several crimes, in fact, minimally breaking and entering and kidnapping. A code then? Like “10-4” for “okay” or “20” for “location”? “Susie” just meant something and “Charley” stood for something else. I had to lay my hands on a computer with internet access to see what I could fish out through Google. I asked for the internet at Mel’s but they did not provide such service. I paid for my ice cream and went out into the wet night again.

SPECIAL OPS

I went to the Holliday Inn on Van Ness and California. Hotels always have internet. Having settled down in front of one of their complimentary computers with my ridiculously overpriced coffee bought from their restaurant, I was ready for a good bout of Google search. Computer search is fun. To me it has always been a process of exploration and learning. This time I was not looking for fun and so I had my answer within seconds. “Sussie” and “Lima Charley” turned out to be military—Marine Corps—slang terms for “woman” and “loud and clear” respectively. Military slang terms. That also explained the choice of words, such as “secure” and “ma’am” and the dumb badge shuffle. Military. Marines, actually. Special Ops.

Now things really did not make any sense. I was being chased by the Marines—or ex-Marines?—and they had Linda now. That was trully crazy.

But at least I knew military mentality, I could relate to these guys, I could predict their actions and line of thought. Military doctrine holds that soldiers, not being stupid or suicidal, are driven in their actions by their will to survive and, therefore, a military unit, whose base had been overrun by enemy, would abandon the base and stay away from it, lay low or retreat to safety. Such unit would not be expected to double back home. In other words, if they considered me a worthy opponent they would not expect me to go back to my apartment. But they did not consider me a military man. I was just a twenty-four year old lab technician. Or, to them, an absolute nobody. So they’d expect me to go straight home. They must have left something for me there. How else would I connect up with them long enough to find out what the hell they wanted from me?

I thought guards were my only enemies but now I was dealing with Special Ops sharp shooters killing FBI agents on my behalf in the middle of San Francisco and kidnapping innocent citizens just to get me rattled. “Hey guys!” I wanted to shout, “I am just a lowly lab tech! What do I know about anything you might be interested in? Nothing! Let Linda go and let’s just talk it over!” It occurred to me that talking to them would do me no good. They were not the ones pulling strings, they just did what they were told.

The entire crux of being a Marine, or military in general, is taking orders. Somebody is always giving orders. The boots on the ground are not involved in all the pesky shuffle that the rest of the population call “life”. They eat, sleep, use latrine, work, attack and retreat or die by orders. That is the beauty of military life. It relieves one of pretty much any responsibility for anything. The additional perk is that you are free to natter about the stupidity of your superiors and their orders but, of course, you still comply with the orders.

In my case, the orders had to come from somebody high up. And they came fast. I was identified and implicated in the murder of two FBI men within 30 minutes. So either the chain of command was very short or they had a person authorized to make such decisions right here on the ground. I needed to talk to him—later. How high up did the chain of command go? Very high, higher than FBI. Department of Defense? The White House? This was getting way beyond silly. Mere silliness was a threshold that we passed over an hour ago. This was insanity.

I took a cab home, got off a block away and walked from there. Nothing suspicious or out of place. Took stairs to my apartment, opened the door, half-expecting an ambush. Nope. Turned on the light. The place was trashed for real this time. Stepping over the broken furniture and my linen closet contents on the floor, I went to the kitchen to check on Yvette. I found her. She was dead, a small brown corpse of my dear little bird on the floor, all deformed. Somebody just squeezed her in a fist, broke her little bones. She was so trusting, so easy to pick up. My little sparrow, thank you for our time together. None of our guys would ever think of doing anything that pointless and heartless. Whoever did this would kill Linda and me, too, without thinking. Whoever these people were, they were all dead.

It occurred to me that they had not found whatever they were looking for. Otherwise, I would be grieving over Linda’s corpse now, too, not just Yvette’s. They must have left a message for me, some instructions, probably. I walked into the bathroom and noticed an old manila envelope nailed to the wall with a double-edge black commando knife, driven through the envelope deep into the wall. I tore the envelope off and emptied it on the kitchen table. There was a small cell phone inside. Nothing else. I staffed it in my pocket. You want me to call you? Sure, I’ll call.

What if they were watching me now though some hidden cameras? I turned off the lights, ran to the bedroom and found my backpack on the floor. Then I ran in the darkness to the office, ripped the wooden panel off, then the drywall and groped for my black box. It was still there. I staffed it into the backpack and threw the commando knife in there too. The phone rang.

I answered the phone. Must be the men I was going to kill soon.

“Hello.”

“Hey, Gordon. You turn off the light? You ever heard of heat scanners? Is that the level of your competence, man? How can you stand looking at yourself in the mirror?” The voice belonged to the group leader, the one who gave the command to secure the woman, the soon-to-be corps. A was right, they were watching.

“I can also wiggle my ears . . .”

“Man, you are pathetic! Just give us what we want and you can have your nigger back. Deal? Do you have the thing?”

“No, not yet, but I know where it is!”

“Good. You have an hour to get it. Then wait for further instructions.”

The line went dead. I pushed the recent calls button.

“What?” Same voice on the line, irritated now. Quiet in the background.

“Hey . . . What do I call you?”

“Call me “Sir”, you moron. What do you want?”

“Okay, Siryoumoron, let me talk to Linda.”

“Are you setting the rules now? You talk to Linda when I say you talk to Linda. Hurry up in there and stop calling me! Fifty-nine minutes!” Click. The line went dead again.

I pushed the recent calls button.

“What?!”

“You know where I am, you know I have a Glock. You don’t know yet that you missed my hiding stash in the office wall with a Beretta and two fragmentation grenades. So now you know. You want me, come and get me.” I hung up.

The cell phone rang.

“Good evening. How may I help you?” I asked politely.

“You moron, how long you think you’ll last with your two frags? Ten seconds? You have no chips to bargain with and your bitch . . .”

“Don’t they teach you manners at Marine corps? You insulted my girlfriend twice already. I will kill you soon but very slowly. No deals.” I hung up.

The cell phone rang. I picked it up.

“Gordon, it’s me!” It was Linda.

“Hi, honey! How are you holding up?”

“I am okay, Gordon, but I am scared! Please hurry up, give them whatever they want . . . I am scared . . .“ Linda was crying. She has never been a hell of a fighter.

“I am hurrying, sweetie, now listen to me carefully. Are you listening?”

“Yes, but . . .”

“Do not repeat anything I say after me. They will release you soon at Mascone Center. Just stand there and wait. You will be picked up by the owner of the place we went to for our second anniversary, tell the owner to call me. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good girl, give me the guy back.”

The grunt was back on the line.

“What now?” The guy sounded more guarded now. Didn’t like that I found them out as the Special Ops, did he?

“The deal has changed. I want the girl out now and I want a hundred thousand dollars cash when I give you the flash drive. Drop Linda off in front of Mascone Center and do not follow her or you’ll never see the flash drive.”

“Fuck you!”

I guess I was right about the flash drive.

“And no more cussing from you! You are disgrace to the Corps!”

Silence. Tables have turned.

“Okay, I will check on the woman.”

“And the money. When I safely have both—the woman and the money—in that order, I will give you the flash drive.”

“How’s about I just kill the bitch and then we storm the apartment and beat you to a pulp till you talk? How is that?”

“Okay. See you soon.” I hung up.

The cell phone rang.

“Got the money yet?”

“I read your file, Gordon. You are a nobody, a fucking lab tech. You are nothing, you hear? You are bluffing. And where am I supposed to get a hundred grand? Are you crazy? It would take a week!”

“What are you a Sergeant? A Lieutenant? I do not like you, pisshead. There is no such thing as a “nobody”, you hear? The price has just doubled. Two hundred grand. Your Command is here in town. Just call them. You have thirty minutes to get back to me with the news that Linda is free and you got the money—both. Move your ass, soldier!”

I hung up. The cell phone did not ring. Man, how many phone calls does it take to get a simple idea across?

Linda was safe for now. My actions did not make her any less safe. I had more intel. I needed more finances and personnel.

I was walking calmly down the street, away from my apartment. Sirens blared, two police cruisers speeded up past me toward my apartment building. I heard more sirens in a distance. Turning the corner I found Fulton busy as usual. I flagged a cab and told the cabby to take me to Union Square.

In the car I took out the box and opened it. First thing I saw was a small white envelope with my name on it. I reached into the envelope and took out a flash drive.

THE BATTLE

The fact that I found the flash drive in my black box narrowed the possibilities of who might have placed it there down to one. The only person aware of the existence of my black box and its location was my old A5B buddy Gunnery Corporal Torl, currently known as Miguel Lopez, a 45-year old Comcast technician residing in Berkeley with his wife Estella and three kids. We met last over a year ago in my apartment, he fixed my internet. I called Torl from the FBI phone. Estella told me, crying, that Miguel has not been home or seen at work for two days, she alerted police and understandably feared the worst. So did I.

Siryoumoron called me before the 30-minute deadline was over and told me that they had access to the money.

“And the woman?”

“On her way to Mascone Center”.

I told him to get the money together and wait for further instruction after I heard confirmation from Linda that she was okay.

I paid the cabbie from my emergency thousand and got lost in the crowd. Union Square is always crowded. Walking unhurriedly, I took out my cell phone, put the battery back in but didn’t turn it on. I removed and destroyed the SIM card from James Burk’s, the dead FBI sniper, cell phone and threw the phone in a trash can on the corner of Post and Powel. I diligently checked for any tail. Seemed clear. Then I went to an ice cream place and stood in line for a bit. Standing in lines gives great opportunity to look around. All clear. Stopping at Macy’s I bought a few pairs of underwear and socks, a toothbrush, a small suitcase, a pair of black casual shoes, a nice pair of dark blue pants, a casual shirt and a tan sport jacket. That set me back four hundred and eighty bucks.

Then I checked into a relatively inexpensive Taylor Hotel, that was catering mostly to students, backpackers and budget conscious tourists. Neatly dressed and with a suitcase in hand I am sure I did not invoke the slightest suspicion. I was asked for my driver’s license and I obliged by giving them personal license, keeping Augustine Molino’s for later. It worked just fine.

“This way Mr. Bolstad,” the clerk summoned bell boy politely ushered me into my room.

“Thank you.” I gave the bell boy his tip and he left.

The room they gave me was nice enough, well worth a hundred bucks a night, I suppose. The only problem was, as with all hotels room, that the room was a trap because it had only one exit. However, tonight I had other plans anyway. Special Ops knew exactly where I was already but wouldn’t move until they were sure I had the flash in my possession. Cops and FBI would not be able to trace me here for some hours. I rented this room specifically with the purpose to have it found by the cops in the morning. Time check—10:55. The night was still young.

I went out again, drifted in and out of a few stores with the crowd, bought a cheap flash light, shoe polish and some string, found an AT&T place on Powel and bought a go-phone with a bunch of minutes for fifty dollars. Many stores were still open despite the late hour.

I called the number of Bistro Zhiguli, my favorite Russian restaurant-bar on Fulton and Masonic and waited for the owner, Eugene, to answer. Eugene was a bolding middle aged Russian, pleasant and chubby, easy to smile.

In addition to proudly sporting the best food within at least a three-mile radius, four large TV screens and ambience friendly enough for the cook to come out and mingle with the visitors, Eugene’s Bistro also carried forty-eight different kinds of beer from around the world—all on tap—most likely the largest beer collection under any one roof in the known Universe. Eugene called himself a beer therapist and claimed to have cured or driven into deep remission a wide variety of ailments ranging from flat-footedness and hair loss to clinic depression and everything in between. The medical miracles apparently even included curing a broken arm once—in as far as the arm seemed totally healed to its owner after a carefully measured dosage of three liters of Belgian Westvleteren-12 administered with half a pound of beer nuts within an exact thirty-minute period. With alcohol content of 10.2 percent, three liters of Westvleteren-12 would probably cure any disease known to man, except, perhaps, the cirrhosis of the liver.

Most importantly, the Bistro owner, Eugene, was connected to the Russian organized crime. Did I have any solid evidence for such certainty? Of course not—nothing solid, just the “shadow-outpoints” as I used to call them. There are correctly included plus-points in life, something you would expect to find, and there are incorrectly included out-points, unexpected and incongruous facts that raise the question WHY. You’d expect to see a cook in a restaurant, for example, but not necessarily a cook—an excellent cook, by the way, by the name Konstantin—with a gun in a shoulder holster. I did not see the gun but I knew it was there—just the way he moved and the way he wore his jacket. Oh yeah, it was there. WHY would a cook need a gun? Furthermore, you might expect—or accept, reluctantly or otherwise—that the proprietor joins you at your table every now and then, but not necessarily that he pays your tab. If Eugene liked you, often enough everything you wanted was on the house. WHY? Eugene liked and enjoyed the company of many people. With such a questionable business model in place, how could he possibly make a living and keep up a posh place, such as Zhiguli? Money laundering was not an entirely implausible answer to that conundrum. There were other plausible answers, too—none within strict boundaries of the Law. I liked Eugene and even knew his wife, kids and governess who they called Aunt Rosa but in cultivating our relationship with him, I admit, I was not motivated exclusively by his sunny personality. Right now, in my estimation, Eugene could be trusted and could protect Linda against the Special Ops better than police if he wanted to.

Eugene answered on the third ring.

“Hi Eugene, this is Gordon. Need a favor.”

“Hi man! What kind of favor?”

“Just need you to organize a car to pick up Linda in front of the Mascone center. Should be a car untraceable to you. I want Linda in a secure location for now. Whoever picks her up should make sure to shake off any tail.”

“Gordon, what is this number you are calling from?”

“A go-phone I just bought.”

“Good boy. Hey, listen, what kind of trouble are you trying to get me into—just curious?”

“What kind of trouble would you like to get into?”

“Me? I am a respectable businessman. I only like trouble that let me put some bread and butter in front of my poor little children.”

“How much bread and butter would you like for your poor children? A hundred thousand cash okay? Can we get orders out on getting Linda picked up and then discuss trivial matters?”

“Certainly! I’ll call you back in a couple of minutes.”

He did, in a few minutes.

”So Gordon, we left off at you offering me a certain sum of money.”

“Yeah. I offered you a hundred grand. Acceptable?”

“Peanuts. You know how much children eat nowadays? And they also need shoes. It is raining all the time right now, just terrible weather. Do you actually have the money?”

“No.”

“Now, tell me, Gordon, you nice kid you, aren’t you driving an old Rabbit and working at some office as a clerk or something?”

“Yes on the Rabbit and no on the clerk. But you see, right now I am well into starting a business venture. Remember how you always told me that I was special? Well, I am onto a very high profit margin deal here. Unfortunately, my regretfully unscrupulous business associates held Linda briefly against her will to pressure me into some questionable conduct but I convinced them to let her go. I want to ensure her safety and I may need some other small favors from you in a very near future.”

Silence.

“Gordon, what makes you think that as a restaurant owner I am in any position . . .”

“Mainly your mob connections, Eugine. You were right about me. I am special, I have eyes. So what are you gona do? I am offering you a cut.”

“Okay. What kind of small favors? You need a muscle? Tell me, how much are you expecting to get out of this . . . business venture or whatever it is you are doing—and when?”

“I suppose I could get a mill within a day or two.”

Long pause. I patiently waited. I was sure the general situation was clear to Eugene with no further explanations.

“You know, Gordon, you bright kid you, you know how much I love you? I would happily have Linda stay with my friends and my family for a while as a dear guest and do other small favors for you—just as a friend. But bread and butter for my poor children . . . You know half a mill does not go nearly as far now as it used to. Inflation is something terrible. You know how much I am paying for a head of lettuce for my restaurant now?”

“What half a mill?”

“Just thinking aloud, Gordon. Just considering possibilities. I would not get up in the morning and face uncertain future for a hundred grand so . . . ”

“How much extra would you need for the lettuce?”

“Two point seven five million dollars in total, all expenses included.”

“But I am only getting one million, Eugene! I just told you that! And I’ve been doing all the heavy lifting so far!”

“Well, I figured if you told me one mill, you are probably in for at least ten. So two point five mill is not that much to ask for my poor children. They need winter coats too, not just shoes and bread and butter. You want them to freeze to death? Have a heart! Deal?”

“Two point five now? No deal.”

“Gordon, everything is so expensive. Do you see what these Democrats are doing to our wonderful country? They are killing us! Over twelve percent unemployment right here in California alone! My heart goes out to these poor people, Gordon! Don’t you understand? We are in this mess all together, let’s work together, man! What are we even arguing about? Is two and a quarter million really that much to ask?”

I liked this guy. There was just the two hundred grand in the asking as of yet but I enjoyed the Russian bargaining procedure, a whole new world and a lot of fun, too. I suddenly realized that I have not been bored for hours.

“Okay, Eugene, listen to me, one point five mill and that is my final offer. I could go get some muscle practically anywhere for one-fifth of that but I wanted to let you make some money as a friend. You know how much I love you? You are like a family to me. So take it or leave it.”

“No, I will help you, Gordon . . . of course! For two mill even. But only because we are family! I hope when I am old and weak and I need somebody to give me a glass of water, you’d help me too. We all have to stick together.”

“Yes, of course.”

“One more thing, Gordon. Of course if your business venture goes sour and you don’t pay, I am afraid you won’t walk away by simply washing dishes at my bistro, you understand. There are some rules here. Got to have rules, otherwise it is just a mess like what these Democrats want—no order. You know what Obama said today?”

“Okay, I understand, Eugene. Great! Settled then. Thank you very much. Keep Linda safe! Please ask her to call me to this number from a safe phone.”

“Alright. Anything you need right now from me in your business venture?”

“Yes. I need you to find me two secluded locations. First one should be a house. Somewhere in the woods, preferably, at least two miles from the nearest Starbucks. I need a good crew at the back of that house in place by 3AM latest, let’s say fifty yards behind the house, spread out and well-concealed, okay?”

“Okay. And you want the house around here some place?”

“Let’s say within fifty miles from here or maybe a bit more. Has to be a heavily wooded, secluded area, I want good concealment.”

“So it’s a cabin then, in the woods. Is this house going to remain . . . reasonably intact after you visit it?”

“I won’t steal anything, if that is what you meant, but the house may suffer some minor damage. May even need a new paint job here and there. I got a couple of F1 grenades on me . . .”

“Vintage Russian “Limonka” frags, hey? I like you, Gordon, you are a class act. Remind me of myself a bit. Of course I was much better looking. Okay, I got the picture. Will call you with a location within an hour or two. In our travel agency we never sleep, you know. Service with a smile. What about the second location?”

“The second position should be an old warehouse or a factory out in the sticks. Should double as a holding place. I may have to interrogate somebody there, don’t know yet how it will all work out. It may get noisy.”

“Okay. Will take a bit. Hey, Gordon, who are you? You are not just a clerk, are you?”

“Of course not! I work at the lab!”

Eugene chuckled, “Makes sense! You know, Gordon, deep in my heart I always knew that you were a lab clerk and not just any old regular clerk. Do you need help where you are now?”

“No, I don’t, Eugene, thanks for all your help!”

“You got it, boy! And don’t worry about Linda!”

Instant compliance and never “can’t do” for an answer. Eugene for President! I knew Linda was being safely kidnapped by the Russian mafia now. I just promised to pay them two million dollars. Although I was two million dollars short at the moment, that did not bother me nearly as much at the moment as some other things in life.

Linda called. She was rattled with all the excitement. Eugene apparently had her picked up by several armed men in bad mood. They took her to some house and did not allow her to leave. Probably guarded from me as much as from anybody else—just a little insurance that I don’t skip town with the two million dollars that I owed them now. That was fine. I asked if she knew where she was being held. She had no idea, Figures. I calmed Linda down the best I could and promised to get her out of there tomorrow.

I took a cab to Clement and had a dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant, had my favorite Five-Spice Chicken but did not feel the taste. What was Linda doing? How were they treating her? They might be planning to kill us both but they had absolutely no reason to treat her badly at the moment.

I paid with the dead FBI agent’s credit card just to lead on the cops. On the way out I visited their restroom and left his wallet in the trash can under a wad of wet paper towels. I walked to Geary and took a cab to the airport, changed cabs and went back to Taylor Hotel. I was not hiding from the Special Ops, I knew they could track me through their cell phone, they must have installed a homing device in it. I was too lazy to look for it. Why bother? I knew it was there. But I was worried about the cops and the FBI.

Eugene called me with the first location. It was about a mile and a half off of Rio Nido Road by Guerneville, off 116, off Route 1 North. It was a three-room cabin deep in the woods, currently vacant. The security was going to be disabled and the door unlocked for me by 3AM. The entrance door was facing south. Four of his guys were going to be fanned out about fifty yards north of the back entrance. He told me to Google the place up but I had a pretty good idea already. The house was some seventy-five miles north from my current location in San Francisco. Eugene did not yet have the second position located.

I used the cell phone they nailed to the wall in my apartment to call Siryoumoron. He seemed happy enough to hear from me.

“Hey, Gordon, how’s it hanging?”

“A bit to the left. And you?”

“Pretty good, thanks. Got the stick yet?”

“No, man, but I am driving to get it right now. Will call you as soon as I have it, alright? You got the money?”

“Yeah, I got it right here! Stay in touch!”

Time—12:48. I had to get going to Guernville but I still had to see the files on the flash drive.

I asked a lethargic young man at the front counter downstairs for their business center. They had one here but it was closed for the night. It turned out they had a spare computer station at the counter for the second clerk who was off for the night. He let me use that computer for twenty bucks.

The flash drive contained only two files. One of them was a .jpg image. The other one was a WORD file. The .jpg picture turned out to be just a tourist poster picture of gently rolling hills, covered with lash vegetation and veiled in wisps of fog. Yes, it was very pretty but not helpful. Possibly the file would explain what it was about.

The .doc file was a poem or something—in some East European language. I could probably strain myself and make some sense of the poem but I already saw that I wasn’t going to get straight answers. I was going to get some clues, at best. I had no time or inclination for puzzles at the moment. The flash drive was not going to give me immediate answers as to the nature of troubles Linda and I were in. I got Linda out into a less dangerous position, in my estimation; I got some muscle support and possible evac; I successfully evaded cops so far. That was good. I decided against printing anything out and just copied the files on the hotel computer as hidden files in their MISC folder.

I chatted a bit with the clerk at the counter, said goodnight, making a spectacle of how sleepy and tired I was, and took the elevator up to my room. Having collected my meager belongings and weapons, I went out through the back stairs and the back loading dock door. The time was 1:05AM. A walk around the place confirmed that I was not under visual surveillance. They must be tracking the cell phone from a mile or two away. The Ford Taurus I stole had an almost full tank of gas. In no time I was traveling north across the Golden Gate Bridge and up 101 North, always a pleasant drive. I stopped at Jason’s, a 24-hour restaurant near San Rafael, for some coffee, a sandwich and just to make a stop to confirm my acquisition of the flash drive. Just wanted to make Siryoumoron happy.

I called him after I had my coffee and sandwich.

“Hey, Siryoumoron, I got the drive!”

“Alright! Let’s meet, I got the money.”

“Nah, too tired. I am going to hole up for the night. I got a safe house out in the sticks, you’ll never find me. Will call you first thing tomorrow morning.”

“Well, alright then. See you tomorrow, Gordon.”

Could I be wrong and they were not tracking me? I decided that I couldn’t. My calculations were correct. They were tracking me and most likely following me at a distance, and too great a distance, either, maybe a couple of miles. Now that they knew I had the stick, they’d attack at their convenience instead of waiting for me to organize defenses or skip town altogether. The best time and place was later tonight when I was sleeping in my safe house out in the sticks. I made it clear and sure hoped they reached that same premeditated conclusion. I really did not want them to attack me on the freeway or wait till tomorrow.

I took Route 1 North, then 116 and eventually ended up on Rio Nido Road going north. I found the dirt turn-off into the woods and navigated in the dark through the bumps. Fords are great for this. What if I were driving a Jaguar? It was raining lightly too. Rather adverse driving conditions all around. All through my trip I have not seen anybody following me. Either they were that good or there was, in fact, nobody following me which would be a disaster. I wanted them here, I had a trap set up.

The black shape of the house loomed ahead. I parked right in front of it. I had about an hour, maybe a bit more before the show started. Marines were nearby, probably just a couple of miles behind me at all times, but now they would have to take at least an hour to verify my location, review satellite pictures of the layout, work out at least a rudimentary plan, gear up, then arrive here.

An hour was a lot more than I needed. No rush. I looked at my watch—2:45. Carrying my suitcase I walked through the puddles to the entrance door, noticing a nice parapet porch wall to the left of the door, shining my flashlight under my feet. I did not see any other tracks. An open door would indicate that the Russians were here, they were supposed to disable the alarm and open the door. The entrance door was slightly ajar. The Russians may not have walked here, but they were here, they may have approached from the back and through the house. The door creaked when I opened it wider. A creaking door! Good.

The house smelled deserted and lifeless. I guess nobody wanted to rent it that far out in the woods during the winter, the rainy season. Too bad, nice place for a ski vacation minus the skiing. The rooms were large, paneled, huge fireplace. Would probably be fun to spend a couple of weeks here with wife and kids.

I changed cloths in the dark, took out the commando knife, the guns and the two frags, packed my new cloths into the suitcase and took the suitcase to “my” Taurus. Back at the house I used one of the old Russian grenades and some string to rig a simple booby trap using the Special Ops cell phone as bate.

Marines are extremely adept at spotting and disarming—or simply avoiding—booby traps. Out in a jungle somewhere or in Afghan mountains, jump up and down all you want, you’d never get a Marine to pick up an unknown object or move anything or even step sideways, tripping any wires. The problem with these specific Marines, however, was arrogance. I was counting on them to commit the error of all errors, to succumb to the ancient curse that destroyed armies and wiped out entire civilizations: underestimating the opponent, thus violating rule number two of hostile engagement “Never underestimate your opponent.” Arrogance, not curiosity killed the cat.

Having set up the grenade, I went out to look for a good position for myself. They had a sniper, a good one. I saw him in action. If I had a sniper, I’d deploy him, of course, but where? In front of the entrance, higher up on a tree, ideally within a hundred feet from the front door and no further than that from my car. Walking around in the dark I only found two good positions for a sniper. There were only two large trees in front within a hundred feet. One of them had the propane tank right under it. I would position my sniper on the other tree, far enough from the propane tank. The tree was well to the left from the entrance seventy-five to a hundred feet away. It is difficult to judge distance exactly in the darkness but I had the position pretty well figured out in my mind.

The Special Ops must have a car or several cars. Where would they park them? An important question because there they’d most likely leave one man, let’s call him Wheels, to guard the cars, insure quick evac if needed, and double as the back spotter and the last containment line. To be potentially effective at all, Wheels would have to be positioned close enough to the house to see what was going on. Would make a lot less sense to park the cars half a mile away in the bushes. If I had my sniper up on the tree about a hundred feet to the left of the entrance door, I’d put my backlines spotter, Wheels, in front of the door, possibly a bit to the right, at most thirty or forty feet to the right. I marked in my mind the position of the parked cars and Wheels holed up behind one of them. Now, time the gazillion dollar question: where would I be attacking from? I had no silenced firearms but I had a knife. To use it effectively I would have to be located close behind their back containment line, Wheels, with no threat from my back—except Eugene’s sniper somewhere that way, of course, with a night vision scope. I was sure he’d have at least five guys here if he said he’d have four and I was sure that the guy in front of the house was going to be a sniper with a night vision scope. Would not make any sense for Eugene to cover the back and leave the front wide open. But that was neither here, nor there. Russians were not my enemies in this engagement; they just wanted to keep an eye on the money.

With the cars parked and the Wheels located as I expected, my best position turned out to be good forty feet further away from the house in a clump of dense low bushes. I’d have to cover some forty feet of open space without alerting Wheels. Could be done. That is why God created diversions. Wheels would have to get thoroughly destructed first. Then I take him out. Then I’d have to cover some hundred feet to get to their sniper up on the tree. How? Very quietly. The rest of the plan was rather vague in my head, somewhere between “just shoot them up” and “just kill them all”. I did not have to worry about any of the Marines escaping through the woods in the back, I had Eugene’s people fanned out there. Well, grunts, as promised, this was going to hurt. I promised Siryoumoron to kill him slowly. I also wanted to find out which one of these animals killed my Yvette and make sure that bustard was offered a few minutes to reflect on the past and do some soul searching before he died. I had to get myself psyched up because killing one-lifers requires a strong stomach. When you kill them, they die for real, for all intent and purposes.

I smeared my face and hands with shoe polish and hid in the clump of bushes. I was not worried about their infra red scanners. They’d never use them to scan that far out in front of the house, they were just too arrogant.

Nothing was moving. I was holed up in my bushes, cold, wet and miserable. Was I wrong? Were Marines on their way here or were they sleeping peacefully in warm beds in San Francisco while I was freezing my ass off? Finally, with a great deal of relief I saw two shadows move toward the house more or less noiselessly. Standard Marine posture with the gun glued to their faces, arms held high—a grossly overrated stance, by the way, as it limits the field of vision. I checked the time—3:55. There were no cars. I did not like that. The deployment seemed totally different, not as I expected. I had no silenced weapons and no night vision equipment, it had to go as planned or I would get fried here and so would the Russians.

The two Marines slipped behind the house to cover the back door.

Then I saw two more black shapes moving toward the house through the woods. They took position right in front of the house, covering the windows and the entrance door.

Then I heard cars moving slowly through the woods with their headlights off. There were two cars, both dark, one a sedan and the other one an SUV. They parked them right where I thought they would. Whew! Something was going as planned.

From where I was I could not see exactly how many more Marines got out but it looked to me that they had four more to the total of eight. I heard muffled clanking far to my left. That must be the sniper taking his position, the one who murdered Agents Burk and Silezny in cold blood. The rain stopped, there was not a movement in the air. Total stillness, wet darkness and silence. The stillness and silence part was not going to last much longer.

Then I heard a barely audible at this distance creak of the entrance door. The front attack unit went in.

The diversion I was waiting for was a grenade explosion. Would they spot the booby trap? No chance, not these clowns—too arrogant, too ruthless, too intoxicated with their power over us mere mortals (ha!). Delusional. Not a chance they’d ever spot my primitive booby trap. Not a chance.

I got ready. Ah, love a good battle! The blast was muffled as it was inside the house but it ripped through the wilderness nonetheless, loud and somehow unexpected, even for me although I was actually waiting for it.

I could vaguely make out Wheels talking urgently in his earpiece by the front end of the sedan, trying to get the scoop on the grenade explosion. He was facing the house. I simply ran toward him, reached over his shoulder, clapping his mouth, while inserting forcefully the commando knife, complements of the Marines, through the base of his neck. He went down as if somebody had suddenly chopped his legs off. He never saw what hit him and never uttered a sound.

The sniper was next in line. He had seconds left to live. Funny how that works. He thought he was well concealed and far away enough from any real danger. I spotted him as soon as he spotted me. A sniper with a laser night scope is vulnerable that way, betrayed by the red light. I saw the red laser dot sliding effortlessly toward me. Dropping down, a bullet whistling over my head, I shot the sniper four times with my Glock—unsilenced, of course. The sniper’s body fell off the tree heavily, banging and clanking. The sounds of moaning, labored breathing and gargling reached me just as silenced automatic fire from a Marine by the house entrance slapped the vegetation around me. I reached the dead sharpshooter’s former position in three huge leaps. The sounds of me tearing through the low growth betrayed my exact position and bullets started pounding the tree trunk just the instant I slid behind it, right next to the wounded sniper. He was not actually dead yet. One of my bullets struck him in the throat. He was busy splattering blood and gargling right that very minute, no longer a super legend in his own mind, I am sure.

He looked at me just as I got down next to him behind the tree.

“Can you hear me?” I asked softly.

He nodded and hissed something.

“I executed you for the murder of FBI Agents James Burk and Frank Silezny and for your participation in the kidnapping of Linda Hunt. You will die shortly. Any questions?”

“Orders . . .” the sniper hissed, struggling to make himself understood, willing me with his eyes to hear and understand him. I did, I heard him perfectly well and I understood what he said. He said “Orders.” P-3 convicts! They are absolutely unable to receive an order without thinking up a bunch of weirdly convoluted complexities around it.

“You gave the oath to defend Americans against all enemies foreign and domestic. What part of that order didn’t you understand?”

The sniper was no longer listening, his eyes wide open but looking inward, looking at something he did not want to be looking. Then he slumped down with his eyes still open but no longer alive.

I looked out. Shadows in the darkness. I barely made out two Marines flanking me from the right with one covering them from behind a parapet porch wall in front of the house. I had to assume that a couple of other Marines were coming around from the left, except I did not know exactly how many there were in total to begin with and how many I got with my booby trap F1 grenade. I could only vouch with certainty for the two I killed and three that I could currently see.

I took out the second F1. Crouching close to the ground, I took a few quick steps toward the attacking Marines, shooting from my Glock in their direction. Yelling “Grenade!” I changed direction, rushing toward the porch, pulled out the pin and only then threw the grenade behind me, made a couple more quick steps and hit the wet dirt. The grenade exploded close enough to the two flanking Marines, it was a good throw judging by screams and curses of one of the Marines. I was only about twelve or fifteen feet from the parapet wall with my Glock lined up to fire at the Marine who was holed up there. I took him out with one shot in the forehead as soon as he pocked his head out. I jumped behind the parapet wall accompanied by the sound of bullets pounding old brick.

Everything went quiet again. So far I was certain that I killed three of approximately eight enemies and wounded one. I crawled to the entrance door and then inside the house and got up in crouching position. It was dark. I moved carefully with Glock on the ready toward the booby trap location. I smelled blood, then stumbled on a dead body at the entrance to the last room. He was facing out of the room when the fragment caught him in the back of the head. He must have spotted the trap or heard the pin coming out but too late. I searched the dead Marine, found nothing of any interest to me except for a couple of MK3A2 concussion grenades hooked to his vest. That was probably more weaponry that I needed or even wanted. I hate dragging luggage around. I started out with a knife, the Glock with a total of twelve rounds left, my ancient Beretta M-1934 fully loaded, which is only seven rounds, and two grenades. I still had four rounds in my Glock and the fully loaded Beretta while four of the Marines were confirmed dead and one wounded. True but I did not want to brake rule number two “Never underestimate the opponent” just as I was betting my life that the Marines would. For them their arrogance meant speedy demise but so it could for me, just as speedy a demise, although not nearly as permanent.

I stuffed the grenades in my pockets and started sideways, slipped on something and almost fell. The wooden floor was slick with blood under my right foot. It could not have been from the dead soldier in front of me as he never made it that far. There must have been another Marine—badly wounded—who must have crawled out through the back door. I peeked out and saw a body a couple of feet away on the back porch, laying on its stomach. I crawled out on my stomach slowly and examined the dead Marine with my hands in the dark. Sure enough he had a hole at the top of his head. The Russians had night vision silenced sniper rifle on this side too. I felt like an armature. Why couldn’t I ever get prepared properly for anything? Everybody else was always better prepared than me. With a deep sigh I crawled back inside, walked through the house then out through the open entrance door to the front yard.

4:06. Five Marines were dead and one wounded. The two who I suspected went to the left of their sniper’s position were not accounted for. I knew that taking heavy losses they’d probably fell back to their base position behind the cars. One of them was probably on the horn right now reporting the situation and asking for further orders. So I knew where they were. They must have picked up the wounded soldier and carried him behind the cars with them. The distance was about fifty feet, close enough for a grenade except I was not sure exactly where to aim my throw. It was too dark. I had to get closer. Crouching and moving silently to my left, then forward, I kept first the house and then the bushes directly to the back of me, thus concealing the outline of my body, letting it blend with the background. When I was close enough to make out vague shapes of the parked cars, I threw both of my concussion grenades behind the cars and ran to my right counting out four seconds, then hitting the dirt. MK3A2 is a modified version of the very familiar to me World War II MK grenades, just eight ounces of TNT with a fuse set for five seconds delay which for safety reasons was usually considered to be a four-second delay. The MKs blew up behind the sedan, one after another, sending one of the Marines flying over the car and lighting up the scenery momentarily. I crawled passed the Marine’s Position One, then doubled back to reach it from behind. I found a wounded Marine there, behind the SUV, moaning audibly, still alive. Must be unconscious, otherwise he’d keep his moans to himself. I could hear laborious breathing as I crawled past him. I finally saw the last Marine on the ground behind the sedan. He was on his back, also wounded but holding his M16 on the ready. His breath was also labored and uneven as if he was suppressing a scream.

“Put down your gun or I’ll shoot!”

The gun clanked on some rock on the ground. I crawled forward silently, getting behind him, not believing for a moment that he was unarmed and just waiting to give himself up—wounded or not. He just witnessed me killing off his entire team, it was prudent for me to be careful.

I finally saw the last Marine with a Glock in his right hand. He couldn’t get up or even move much, it seemed, but he was still fighting all enemies, foreign or domestic. I groped around, found a stick and threw it toward the sedan—clank. The soldier’s hand with a gun jerked up and away from me, I jumped on top of him and wrestled the gun out of his weakened grip. I sat up, pressing his gun to his temple. He was staring at me incredulously in the darkness.

“Who are you, man?” he squawked, choking.

“Don’t waste time, soldier. I have a question for you. Who killed my bird?”

“T’was Adams. Lieutenant Adams.”

“The group leader?”

“Yeah.”

“Where is he?”

“He was inside the house, working the homing beeper.”

So much for killing the bustard slowly. He was either the dead man I found inside or the other one, finished off by the Russians behind the house.”

“Thank you. Where is you Command? Who was running you guys?”

“I need a medic, man. Get me a medic!”

“I will not get a medic for you. I will just leave you here. Your handler knows where you are. He will pick you up either right before you die or shortly after. Time to do a bit of soul searching there, soldier, make peace with yourself.”

“Fuck you.”

“How many of you were here in total?”

“Seven.”

He was lying. There were eight Marines here accounted for already. But his answer indicated to me that there were no more of them left. He’d have to make his answer as close as possible to the truth to be believable.

“Are you going to answer my questions?”

“Fuck you.”

Pointless. I left him there.

I took his Glock, checked it, it was fully loaded—fourteen in the clip and one in the chamber. I threw mine into the bushes, got up and walked to the other guy who was thrown clear over the SUV, checked for vital signs. He was dead. I saw four Russians walking toward me. The go-phone rang.

“Hello! Gordon Bolstad Mortuary, may I help you?”

“Hey, Gordon, you my favorite lab clerk you! Good to hear your voice! How are you doing there?”

“Hey, Eugene, I am done here. Please tell you hooligans not to shot me. Don’t forget to bring in your sniper, too.”

“What sniper?”

“The one in front.”

“Oh, that sniper! Yeah, I have one there, just to help you out if you needed any help.”

“Much appreciate. Listen, how is Linda?”

“She is fine, says “hi” and everything. You got the money?”

“I think I got some of it for now.”

“Gordon, my boys just told me you took out eight Special Ops Marines there all by yourself. Who are you, man?”

“You know me, Eugene.”

“Kind of too heavy duty for a clerk . . .”

“I am not . . .”

“. . . very professional work, man!”

“We aim to please.”

“Well, alright, give the money to Andrey. I’ll talk to you in a minute.”

The line went dead. The Russians walked up to me in the dark, guns ready.

The oldest one of them asked with heavy Russian accent, “Where is the money?”

“Are you Andrey?” I asked.

“Yes, that is me.”

“So why are you pointing guns at me then?”

“Gordon, isn’t it? Gordon, you just killed eight heavily armed Marines. How do I know what’s in your head? Maybe you decided to keep all the money or something.”

“Relax, Andrey, we are all friends here. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead already, I knew where you were and I know about the sniper in front. Have your guys collect up the bodies and check these two cars for the money. And leave the wounded alone!”

“Okay, okay, everybody is a damn boss . . .”

Andrey talked to the guys in Russian briefly, the sniper walked up to us from the tree line in front. He was Asian, most likely a Buriat, a Siberian native. They are born hunters, it is genetic. I talked to one of them many-many years ago. They were able to shot a squirrel in the eye from a hundred paces with a twelve-gage shotgun loaded with a single small pallet just because squirrel pelts with no bullet holes brought more rubles. And this Buriat was not armed with a shotgun. He was carrying an old three-line bolt action rifle, vintage circa 1893, with a scope which was probably made when Lincoln still lived in his log cabin as a young man. No night vision. Buriat didn’t need any. I said that he’d be dead if I wanted him dead but actually I wasn’t sure at all. I glanced at Andrey to check if he noticed that I realized that I was most likely just bragging. He did. He smiled and slapped me on the back patronizingly but said nothing. I guess he wasn’t so sure I wouldn’t kill them all if I wanted to after all and did not want to get into a pissing context with me unnecessarily.

One of his guys brought him a bag from the SUV. Andrey put it on the ground and unzipped it, shining his flashlight inside.

“How much is in here?”

“Two hundred thousand.”

“And the rest?”

“Have a bit more work ahead. Need your guys help.”

“O, yeah. The second location. I’ll take you there.”

“Not yet. I’ll let you know.”

The Russians started dragging dead Marines over laying them out in a neat row. Wounded were laid out separately. Andrey observed them working calmly, grunting approvingly and smoking. Then he turned to me, ”Hey, listen, Gordon, you wonna work with us? We can use a bright kid like you. I can talk to the boss. The pay is good, we get good health insurance, full dental . . .”

“Wow! Eye doctor, too?”

“Oh yeah! And the eye doctor. When you get kids, you get child care paid for. You know, children are the future. Right education is where it’s all at. You, for example. You got education, right? You are some kind of clerk?”

“No . . .” I interjected meekly but Andrey was not listening.

“Education is everything. Before you got educated, could you take out eight Marines? ‘Course not! And I keep telling my older son, that bum . . .”

The Russians surrounded us and took their hats off and shook my hand one by one, respectfully.

“You did a good job,” Andrey explained, “They respect you. You are not just a clerk today, you are a very good clerk.”

“I am not . . . Hey, listen, guys, I respect you too and all but I need to make a phone call, will you excuse me?” I went to the display of the Marine’s pockets content and found a cell phone among knives, grenades and loose ammo. There was only one cell phone there.

I pushed the green button to redial the last number. All the phone calls were made to that same number anyway, Adams never called any other number. He was probably supposed to delete the one he called but as usual with him, arrogance killed the cat—again.

“Status report.” Brisk, commanding baritone on the other end of the virtual phone line. And I thought the dead Marines were vane.

“Er-r . . . Fine, thank you. And how are you?”

“Who is this?”

“Who do you think this is, genius?”

“Gordon Bolstad?”

“Betcha. And who are you?”

“Call me Colonel. Where is Adams?”

“Nice making your acquaintance, Colonel. You don’t know how much you worth to me. Lieutenant Adams is disposed. I mean indisposed! Can I help you?”

“Any of the boys around?”

“Oh yeah, they are around, Colonel! They are all eight right here. They just can’t come to the phone right now. They are all laying on the ground in two neat rows.”

“Did you just kill all my Marines, you crazy son of a bitch?!”

“Well, yes and know. I mean, some of them are wounded. But yes, I have the entire team here. Don’t even know how it happened. What a terrible tragedy. But they started it! They started shooting at me! All I ever wanted was to give them the stick . . . I was so scared, so scared . . . Do you still want the flash drive or screw it?”

“Yes, I want it!”

“Okay. I will give it to you for two million dollars in small used bills.”

“What?! You got your money, you imbecile! Give me the stick!”

“Imbecile? That is something new. You know Adams used to call me “moron”? What a great man and what a terrible tragedy . . . and so young! Anyway, Colonel, you must understand. I need to have two mills because kids need bread and butter. And shoes because it is raining a lot right now. And do you know how much they charge for a head of lattice nowadays? Something terrible! Democrats will ruin this beautiful country, I am tellin’ you . . . Obama . . .”

“Shut up!” The Colonel bellowed. “I don’t know what stupid games . . . Just stay where you are! I am coming with your two million dollars!”

“Sure! And your mother is Virgin Mary, right? No, I am changing location. Will call you shortly with the new coordinates. Come there in two hours. Just you, no army this time.”

“Gordon, you . . . I have a question for you.”

“Yes, Colonel, shoot. So to speak.”

“Who are you, really, Gordon?”

“Do you mean to tell me that you had two FBI agents killed and you lost an entire Special Ops team to get me and you don’t even know who I am? Colonel! I’ll tell who I am! I am a concerned citizen!”

“Listen, you!” He caught himself with difficulty. “I don’t promise to make it in two hours but I’ll see you just as soon as I can, I promise you that!”

“Colonel, if you do not make it in two hours, I am going to the Russians and hello Dolly! You know what I mean, jelly bean? Hello Dolly for you, man! By the way, don’t bother coming without the money. Don’t piss me off. You know what happened to your Marines. Don’t step on the same rake twice. ”

Infuriated Colonel hung up, muttering something terminally dirty.

“Andrey.” I called out to the Russian team leader, “we’ll have the money in two hours.”

“No, we won’t.” Andrey answered, “or you wouldn’t ask for the holding location to torture the bustard. I am not educated all that much but I got extensive work experience.”

Two of the Russians had their machine guns pointed at me now. I looked one of them in the eye. He smiled apologetically and shrugged as if to say, “What do I know?” I looked at Andrey raising my eyebrows questioningly.

“We don’t know if we’ll need to torture anybody! It’s just in case. Have to be ready for anything.”

“Gordon, I heard you ask this guy on the phone for two million green ones. That is how much you owe us. You didn’t ask for any money for yourself. I know why. You are not planning to pay us, that’s why. You want to kill us and keep all the money. That upsets me greatly.”

“But I got the two hundred grand here. That is enough for me. You can take the rest.”

“Two hundred is nothing! You go to Caribbeans with your lady, you won’t last six months.”

“But I am not going to Carribbeans!”

“You wonna stay here? After doing these eight guys here? What’s your game, Gordon? You got ambush waiting for us? Where?”

“What are you talking about, Andrey? I have no idea even where the second position is! Plus you got Linda. So relax, man!”

“I don’t trust you anymore, Gordon. You are just too smooth. You don’t ask for money, you have something cooking. What are you cooking? Talk!”

With a sigh I took out the phone again and redialed the same number.

“Yes.” I heard Colonel answered, still irritated. So sensitive, geez . . .

“Yeah, Colonel?”

“Yes, what is it?”

“I want four million dollars now, not two. Something just came up . . .”

“What?! Did you want a blow job with that, too?”

“Well, I don’t know, it is kind of unexpected. Are you good looking? Do you work out?”

I had to hang up right after that, Colonel was getting hysterical.

“Happy?” I asked Andrey. He wasn’t, I could tell. He was still suspicious and the guns were now poking me in the ribs.

“You called him just because I told you to. You would not have called him on your own. You are cooking something.”

I got bored with this nonsense and simply shook my head and walked away. Nobody tried to shoot me which was good. Andrey got on his phone and got into a long discussion in Russian with Eugene, probably, while I searched both cars that Marines used. Nothing interesting.

Andrey finally got off the phone, came over and told me, looking away, “I am sorry, Gordon, I apologize for over reacting.” He probably just repeated to me what he was told to tell me.

“No problem, man, just doing your job, right?”

Andrey nodded.

“Where are we going now?”

“Just some old machine shop. About half an hour from here. Looks nice and secluded on Google and all—just like you wanted.”

THE COLONEL

We drove to the old machine shop with two cars. I had two of the Russians in my car with their guns pointed at me. I guess I was not as close to my newly found friends as I thought. That hurt. The money went in the other car. The second position turned out to be a large barn with a caved in roof. It was secluded.

“Where do you want us?” asked Andrey. He still avoided looking at me. I wondered what orders he received in regards to me. Or should I even wonder?

Andrey tried to give me a silenced Scorpion but I refused. I had a fully loaded Glock on me and I still had my Berretta. What else does a person need to be happy? Maybe just a little bit of love and human understanding, that is all.

I told Andrey that I expected very few people for this party, one of the guests being the Colonel, the only one we were interested in as he was supposed to bring the money. I made Andrey think that I wasn’t really expecting much trouble. We had no idea what the Colonel looked like. Actually I had no idea about anything at all except my complete certainty in regards to the money: we were not about to get any tonight, despite promises to the contrary. No government agency would possibly come up with four million dollars in small used bills in a matter of minutes. I decided not to share my thoughts in that regard with the Russians, Andrey being so impressionable.

We looked around and holed up inside the machine shop and the Buriat was set up outside on a tree with his antique weapon about seventy yards from the entrance.

Around 6AM the guests arrived for the party. It was still as dark as ever. What a long night! I managed to catch a few winks and felt pretty good when one of the Russians woke me up. I looked out and saw vague outlines of two cars parked sideways in front of the barn. I bet one of the people holed up behind them held a megaphone, getting ready to make a speech. Andrey came over with the news that there were two more sedans at the back.

“Gordon Bolstad, come out with your hands up! The place is surrounded! You have nowhere to run!” I heard the megaphone enhanced familiar baritone of the Colonel.

“I wouldn’t want them to storm the place,” Andrey told me with a concerned frown. “Damn! What went wrong? There are too many of them and we are trapped here. There could be as many as twenty of them out there. And how are you going to interrogate your guy? What is your plan?”

“Plan? Me? Do I look like a man with a plan? Let’s just see how it goes.” Then I yelled out to the man with a megaphone, ”Come and get me, you motherfuckers, I’ll kill you all!”

“What the hell are you doing?” Andrey hissed at me excitedly, his eyes bulging. “They’ll fry our asses here!”

“Oh, relax, Andrey! Don’t be such a crybaby! They don’t even know you are here, they think it is just me. Here, let me show you.”

I fired my Glock twice in the general direction of the sedans unleashing a hailstorm of bullets upon us. Russians scattered for cover and returned fire, shooting into the darkness. I raced to the place by the right side wall that I noticed before, keeping low as a few stray bullets whistled around me. I found the rusty drilling machine, my mental marker, and the caved in part of the floor next to it. Lowering myself through the rotted out floor, I made my way under the floor to the exterior wall. Moving along the wall slowly I found a vent opening, inched through it and found myself outside. Pitch dark and wet, just as I like it. Bending low, I ran toward the front and hit the dirt as I turned the corner.

Everybody except me had silenced weapons and I wasn’t shooting at anybody or anything at the moment. This firefight was an incredibly subdued affair. Keeping to the left and off the line of fire I moved toward the cars quickly. I realized that several of the attackers moved toward the barn and were now between me and the barn behind me. I finally reached the cars, gave them a wide berth and kept going for a bit and then doubled back keeping low. I made out two people cowering behind the front of one of the sedans. That meant that about four more were attacking the Russians in the barn. From about twenty feet away I studied them both carefully. I finally decided which one of them was the Colonel. He was the pissed off and nervous one, the boss.

A grenade explosion lit up the barn in front of us clearly outlining the Colonel and his partner against the bright background. I shot the Colonel’s partner in the head with my Glock and tackled the Colonel, pushing him over the car just as Buriat’s bullet made a hole in the fender next to me. The Colonel dropped his gun but recovered quickly from his surprise attack and cursing reached for his spare gun. I shot him in the left knee and right shoulder and crawled under the car to face the Buriat. The sniper’s position was some hundred feet away. I picked up a silenced M16 laying on the ground and emptied it into the tree. Buriat slid off the tree and hit the dirt with a thud.

I crawled back to the Colonel who was screaming bloody murder and cursing now.

“I told you not to piss me off, didn’t I, Colonel?” I asked Colonel politely. He pulled a knife on me with his left hand and tried to reach me with it now although he could not really move all that well. “You just had to bring the damn army with you and I bet you forgot the money. You are such a nerd!”

Ignoring Colonel’s whining, I pulled him into one of the sedans. It turned out to be a Crown Victoria—what else—the one that had keys in the ignition, got the car started and drove off with my headlights off into the woods. I found the dirt road in the dark and drove on it for a couple of minutes. Then I stopped the car and dragged the cursing Colonel out.

“Colonel, I am going to ask you some questions. If you lie to me, I will shoot you into extremities, then into your balls, then through your spine. Then I will kill you. If you tell me the truth, I will not hurt you anymore and I will get you out of here. Clear so far?”

The Colonel kept cussing and wriggling around, trying to get to me. A terminally pissed off case.

“Who is issuing your orders in regards to me?”

Colonel spat at me. I shot him in the other shoulder with his gun. He yelled and moaned.

“Who is giving the orders?”

Colonel stopped fighting and was still now, gazing at a very far place in his mind somewhere.

“Why should I talk?” He asked with unexpected composure. “You will kill me anyway.”

“I will demonstrate to you why you should talk. Here, pay attention.” I shot him in the other leg. He howled and coughed, then started crying.

“Who is pulling the strings?” I asked again.

“General Kevin O’Hara.” He finally mumbled.

“The Defense Secretary?”

“Yes.”

“Directly?”

“No. We answer up to General Makamura from his staff.”

“Why is he after me?”

“Don’t know.”

“Did he give the order to kill me?”

“No. Makamura’s orders to me were to get the money ready first and buy the stick from you but I decided . . .”

“I understand, Colonel, say no more. You simply wanted to show initiative and save the taxpayers four million dollars, right?”

“Yeah . . .”

“How do you communicate with Makamura?”

“Cell phone in my breast pocket.” I pulled the phone out of his breast pocket and put it into my pocket.

“Okay, Colonel, thank you. I will not kill you. I will get you a medic, later. Just one last question: where is my four million dollars?”

“Getting delivered to my hole at noon today.”

“Where?”

“Furniture Express on Florida and 27th.”

“Thank you, Colonel. I will drive you back now.”

I drove the car with the bleeding and passed out Colonel back to the barn where the silent firefight was supposedly still raging on and jumped out, leaving him in the car.

Carefully I made my way back to the foundation vent on the side of the building, crawled through it back into the building and emerged through the floor by the rusty machine.

I wondered around quietly with Colonel’s silenced Luger .30 on the ready. First thing I found was a dead body of one of the Russians. Then I saw one of the Colonel’s men moaning in the shadows. Making my way through the barn I saw four more bodies, one of them was still alive. It was Andrey, wounded in the stomach and unconscious. I shook him a bit. He grunted and opened his eyes, focusing on my face slowly.

“You came back, Gordon, you bustard! You set us up. Didn’t expect to see you back.”

“Of course I came back. I took their boss for a ride. He told me the money drop location and time. Then I rushed back here as fast as I could while you guys held the fort. You did an excellent job here tonight, Andrey, thank you.”

Andrey brightened up and smiled, then asked, “Have you seen any of my guys alive?”

“Not yet, I only saw three so far, including you. The other two were dead: the Buriat sniper and the blond kid with Uzi. I’ll keep looking.”

“Buriat too? Yeah . . . the blond kid is Dima, he loved his stupid old Uzi . . . I can’t believe you came back, man.“ Andrey moaned, his eyes glazed over.

“Take it easy, Andrey, hang in there. I’ll go look for the other two.”

Andrey did not answer.

I found another wounded Russian unconscious behind a jugged concrete protrusion, probably a part of the old foundation, next to a good size smoldering rip in the back wall. Must be a grenade. It must have been some battle. It is sad how little sense it all has to make and how little of any importance may be at stake in order for people to kill or be killed. Russians were just doing their job and so were the Americans. None of them had any insight whatsoever into the real picture—and neither did I to any significant degree at the moment—they were simply complying with their orders. Sad.

6:42AM. I looked out through the hole in the back wall. It was getting gray outside, not as dark as before. New day was dawning. The grayness swallowed the details of what lay ahead but I could just about make out the shapes of two cars some fifty yards away. Nothing moved out there.

I climbed through the opening and drifted cautiously toward the cars. There was a body of a dead Special Ops soldier not even twenty feet from the back wall, I found two more dead bodies in the tall grass on the way to the cars and two more by the cars. I also found another wounded American soldier and the last Russian, he was dead. He must have been the one who charged the American positions and was probably responsible for several dead soldiers laying around. A hero. What a waste.

At 7AM the morning was in full bloom with the lush North Bay vegetation all spruced up by the rains standing ready to receive the sun. A multitude of small birds woken up to a great morning were shreaking hysterically all around the battlefield, jumping excitedly around the dead bodies snatching worms in wet grass and darting here and there through crisp morning air. Depending how you look at life, this was going to either be a nice and sunny day or a terrible day. I guess it was going to just be a rather mundane day to the vast majority of homo sapiens but a very important day for me. I just could not wait to find out how it all turns out.

I carried Andrey and the other wounded Russian to the Colonel’s Crown Vic. Unconscious Colonel managed to slump over both front seats, large as they were. A big guy. I set him up. Supported by the seat belt, Colonel held the sitting position rather well. With the two Russians laid out on the back seat I was almost ready for the return drive to San Francisco to get Linda out, except for the money. A stroll through the brisk morning freshness to the Russians’ car rewarded me with the money bag, my two hundred thousand. Why did Andrey decide that I would want to hole up on some Caribbean island the minute I laid my hands on any money? There is just nothing more boring to me in the known Universe than a long vacation with all the pina coladas and coconut sunscreen lotion. No purpose, no future, no production, no help to anybody, nothing to win and nothing to lose and smells nauseating. Pure suffering. No, thanks.

The drive back to the City was rather uneventful. Kind of a repeat of my drive out of the City last night plus the money and minus the rain, Marines and most of the uncertainty. The situation was much clearer in my mind now. I was in possession of some computer files that were wanted by the Defense Secretary of the United States of America who ordered his minions to pay me four million dollars for them. His orders were disregarded and sabotaged locally which resulted in a loss of two FBI agents, fourteen Special Ops troops and three Russian gangsters, not to mention about a dozen wounded. I knew there was a reasonable explanation to all the last night’s conundrums and here it was. It was clear now except for one small point: why the hell would General O’Hara be willing to pay four million dollars, taking considerable political and administrative risk, for a picture of some hills and a poem in foreign language? Furthermore, why would such valuable files be planted in my apartment? That was especially puzzling. Why me? What special qualities did I possess that made Miguel Lopez take the chance of placing such important documents into my custody? The only conclusion I came up with, depressingly enough, was that it was my mediocrity, my depressions and terminal boredom that made me the least likely custodian of the documents, thus lending Linda and I in the middle of this deep and seething snake pit of trouble.

I drove the Crown Vic straight into the underground Safeway parking on Fulton one block away from Eugene’s Bistro, walked across the street into a Starbucks, got some coffee and called Eugene on my go-phone.

“Hello Gordon!” Eugine picked up right away. He was probably sitting there waiting for my call with his phone in his hand.

“Hi Eugene!”

“Where have you been, man? How did we do? Why isn’t Andrey answering? Did you get the money?”

“Hey, slow down Eugene. We got into a serious fire fight at the second position. You lost three guys. I have Andrey and one other wounded in my car with me right now. I also have a wounded Special Ops Colonel in there with them.”

“Hell . . . Who did I lose?”

“Don’t know the names.”

“What about my Burtiat sniper?”

“The one who was supposed to kill me? He is having a very bad night. First he missed me and then he got dead. All on the same night.”

“Buriat shot at you and missed?! Never mind. I don’t want to know. What am I going to do with the Colonel? And what about the money?”

He never denied that Buriat was supposed to take me out. Some friend. God, protect me from my friends and I’ll take care of my enemies myself.

“The Colonel was supposed to get the money at noon, here in the City at Furniture Express on Florida and 27^th. Keep Colonel on life support till then, he’ll get you the money.”

“Okay. What about you?”

“I am gone for now. Have to take care of some things. I am leaving the car on A Level at the Safeway parking garage on Fulton and Masonic. It’s a black Crown Vic with the three wounded inside. I’ll be in touch. Keep Linda safe.”

“I get an impression that you don’t trust me, Gordon. Are you still upset about Buriat? Come on! Stay by the car, we’ll pick you up.”

“I trust you, Eugine, I just like to have things in order. There has to be order, you know? Otherwise, it’s like Obama. You know what he did today?“

“No. What?” Eugene picked up eagerly.

“How do I know? See? That’s the point! It’s a mess!”

I hung up.

It only took about half an hour by taxi to cover the two miles from Masonic and Fulton to Eugine’s mansion on Green Street. Just down Masonic, right on Geary, right on Green, that is all. San Francisco is especially annoying at rush hour. I could have probably walked faster—and cheaper.

I prided myself in all the careful work I did last summer to get Eugine to invite me over. I cleaned up his files and reloaded a few things on his home computers. I really wanted to see where he lived and meet his elderly housekeeper Aunt Rosa. By then I have already met his wife at the Bistro on several occasions and I knew he had two school age sons. In addition to Eugine, his wife Clara, their two sons and the housekeeper they also had a live-in security guard by the name Oleg, a grim Russian Afghan vet, tough as nails. I wasn’t much impressed with Eugine’s enormous but impersonal house so I had to exaggerate my awe just a tad. The reasoning behind having such a huge and unwelcoming house for a family of just six escaped me as usual. In life I often felt like a stranger at a party. Everybody else, except me, seemed to know exactly why people strive to the hilt to live in huge houses that cost millions of dollars. It made perfect sense to them. A four thousand square feet, four million dollar mansion with an underground garage for a dozen cars for a family of six sure felt like an inside joke to me.

At 9:30 AM I stood in front of Eugine’s house intercom feeling mildly irritated again by the same inside joke. Sullen Oleg opened the door and I told him that Eugine sent me to check on the computers. He said he’d have to call Eugine. I told him to go ahead and walked past him. Aunt Rosa did not recognize me until I gave her the password “Britney Spears”. Then she was all hugs and smiles. She called me “moy horoshiy malchik” (“my good boy”) ushering me into a roughly two hundred square feet kitchen where the family probably spent most of their waking life. As I found out on my first visit here last year, Aunt Rosa loved Britney Spears songs so I put together a couple of CDs for her from the free songs on the web. Now she loved me. I guess I am not really as dumb as I look. Clara, Eugine’s wife, was still asleep. The ever prudent Oleg was on the phone with Eugine who must have told him he wanted to talk to me so he gave me his phone.

“Hi Eugene! How are you?”

“Gordon, what the hell are you doing in my house? Are you out of your mind threatening my family, you moron?! What do you think will happen to you and Linda if you take Clara hostage?!”

Why do people keep calling me a moron?

“Hey great to hear your voice too, Eugine! We are just relaxing here. Aunt Rosa and I are about to have some tea now. Oleg may join us. Clara is still asleep. Do you want me to wake her up?”

“Don’t come near Clara, you hear?! Out of my house immediately! Give me Oleg, I’ll tell him to throw you out or shoot you in the head—or both!”

“You know all the troubles with the Marines last night? Yeah, Oleg is here. Do you want to talk to him? No? I’ll just have some tea, you give me Linda and I leave. It is the neatness of things that counts, remember? I like to have things in order, just like you, I am sure. Let’s do things right. Send Linda over to meet me here.”

Oleg was listening in impassively, not showing any alarm in any way. Eugine must not have expressed any surprise about me being here to Oleg. Good sign.

Eugene was silent for a long minute. I could make out the sounds of “Good Morning America” partially buried under some Russian MTV videos. Four TV screens at the Bistro offered early patrons a wide variety of entertainment this morning. I was not really worried. Eugine was a reasonable man. He would never risk a shootout at his own home and putting his wife in danger just because somebody went a bit above and beyond of what was considered good manners among Russian mafia types. I wasn’t even a Russian or a mafia type. And not only Eugene knew that I wouldn’t hurt a fly unless I absolutely had to, but he also knew that I just killed a number of heavily armed Special Ops Marines as well as at least one of his own troops. So what chance did Oleg have against me in his estimation? None.

Eugine reached the intended conclusions and told me to give him Oleg. He told something to Oleg briefly, got a short grunt back as a reply and that was that. Oleg asked Aunt Rosa for some tea and sat down at the kitchen table with us, his gun holstered. It was going to be a long wait.

A Russian tea ceremony is probably more elaborate than Japanese. Could be, although I never experienced the Japanese ceremony. The tea itself is prepared in a ceramic teapot with dried and crushed tea leafs. You fill the tea pot with boiling water, cover it with a ceramic lid and set it aside for five minutes. Then you boil some more water in another pot and set it next to the ceramic tea pot. Then you get an exquisite porcelain cup into which the lady of the house places a sliver of a lemon and some sugar. Then she put out at least a dozen different types of pastries, cookies and candy while repeatedly apologizing for not having anything at all for her guests. I liked “vanilla sushki” the best. They are kind of like a happy marriage between a donut and a pretzel. The lady of the house pours about half a cup of strong tea from the ceramic tea pot into your cup and then dilutes it with some hot water and adds a tea spoon or two of sugar. That concludes the tea preparation ceremony and starts the tea consumption ceremony which lasts anywhere from thirty minutes to three hours.

Clara woke up around 11 AM and joined us at the kitchen table in her bath robe. She was not particularly surprised to see me, she just smiled and asked me to forgive her for not wearing any makeup. I gave her a complement so convoluted and sugary that I forgot the main point about half-way through but so did she, so that was fine.

Oleg did his rounds now and then. I deleted the temp files and did a defrag on each of Eugine’s computers. We talked about Russia, America, Obama, the Clintons, religions, Britney Spears and recent movies. It was fun.

Linda called me around 1PM that she was parked outside Eugine’s house.

I thanked Aunt Rosa and Clara for the tea and cookies, shook Oleg’s hand and walked out with some sushki’s for Linda—complements of Aunt Rosa.

Linda’s Honda Civic was double parked outside with its engine running. Linda barely let me in and took off like a bat out of Hell. I guess she had a very rough evening and night. And her morning probably was not much better. She has never been particularly strong as a fighter. I glanced at her expecting to see a damsel in distress whom I’d have to calm down and sooth in a manly manner—rough and gentle simultaneously. However, what I saw was a resolutely set jaw, eyes steady on the road and absolutely no blabbering.

“Hi Linda. How are you doing?”

“I am alright, honey. What a night! How are you holding up?” Linda asked me sweetly while scribbling the words “car bugged” on an old Nutcracker show program. Wow! Not only Linda knew about her car being bugged but she also understood the value of not letting the bad guys know that she knew, thus keeping her options open in terms of supplying the opposition with false information.

“I have a room at Tailor hotel. That’s on Union Square. Let’s hole up there, take a shower and get some sleep. Some assholes are after something I have. I tried to sell it to them but they blew it. Lets rest a bit and I am going to the Russians.” I explained loudly and scribbled “Okay. Stop at Grant and Powell.” I could not think how else to use the bug. Stopping some three blocks away from our destination gave me front row seats for the DoD operation at the Hotel and lots of satisfaction but not much of anything else, really.

PLOT PLAN (SUBJECT TO CHANGE)

- Gordon visits Eugine’s home on Green Street, calls him from there with the whereabouts of the car with the wounded

- Gordon gets Eugine to pick to pick up the money at Furniture Express and keep all the money but let Linda go implying threat to Eugine’s family if Linda is not released

- Gordon calls General Makamura using Colonel’s cell phone and password PRAYING MANTICE. Finds out that the flash drive is a part of an escape plan orchestrated by General O’Hara, Defense Secretary who is using US Military against the Guards. Gordon accepts the information from his Command but does not trust Makamura

- Gordon meets up with Linda and explains everything to her.

- Attempt to escape from SF. Police chase, car explosion. The flash drive gets destroyed.

- Gordon and Linda make it back to Taylor Hotel at night and retrieve hidden files

- Linda deciphers the files and finds out the secret that ____________ is hidden in Kiev underground in the catacombs of Pecherskaya Lavra

- Taking a SF cop hostage to get the data, Gordon finds out that in addition to being wanted in relation to the two dead FBI agents, he is also being framed for Mr. Pettit’s murder (finds out that Mr. Pettit was murdered)

- Gordon and Linda escape from SF with 200K in a stolen police car heading for Washington DC to have a talk with General O’Hara who Gordon suspects to be General Brell

- They dump the police car at a rest stop on Route 5 and steel another car, dump it too.

- In a motel, Gordon successfully uses Dn-17 procedure on Linda to get her to remember at least some of her past existence in order to gain her full support.

- Gordon and Linda are discovered by FBI, steal a car. Car chase, escape. Linda shows her strength and fighting abilities for the first time.

- Gordon and Linda abandon stolen car and buy a used car along the way

- Gordon and Linda are attacked and taken prisoners by the Guards posing as a Switkowski Trucking Co. They load up their car inside a truck.

- Interrogation by Guards unexpectedly yields the data that Murabi Empire and Espinol Confederacy are no longer at war, they are allies now and all A5B POWs can just go home. Guards offer to provide them with a space craft. The only stipulation is that General Brell is located and also gotten off planet Earth. Guards recruit Gordon to help find Brell and get him off the planet.

- With the help from the Guards, Gordon finds Miguel Lopez, his former A5B buddy. They connect up with several other A5B POWs who are organizing an escape not knowing that guards are just letting them go

- Gordon brings them the news that they don’t have to escape, the Guards would fly them out but they need to find Brell

- More of the former A5B are assembling together, about 60 total. They decide to all look for Brell

- Search leads them to Denver where they get into more trouble with FBI hot on their trail. In the mountains once again they are attacked by the Special Ops, suffer heavy losses. Marine prisoners intel data indicates their enemy is still the Defense Secretary General O’Hara and his Chief of Staff General Makamura. Gordon and Linda decide to go to Washington DC again and find out what is going on. They are attacked by two of their own former friends from A5B. Interrogation of the two attackers indicate that their orders were from O’Hara who is supposedly Brell

- Flashback of Jesus crucifixion. Gordon was a Roman soldier. Jesus turned out to be Brell who prohibited Gordon from freeing him explaining that his martyrdom at the cross was going to be necessary to help set free people of Earth. Brell had a very strong desire to help people of Earth and died on the cross

- In Washington Gordon and Linda set up surveillance of General Makamura and General O’Hara and find out that wife of General O’Hara practices yoga three times a week at a local place. The place gets searched by Secret Service before every visit.

- Gordon hides inside the yoga studio, avoids being found by Secret Service and takes the wife hostage

- Gordon meets with O’Hara through his wife who is under the gun

- O’Hara says he is Brell but Gordon does not believe him because he met Brell (Jesus) and realizes that O’Hara is not Brell. O’Hara lies about his intentions to organize the remaining crew of A5B for escape. He claims that Guards are just setting up a trap and that Gordon’s cooperation with the Guards made him a target for O’Hara in the first place.

- Gordon lets O’Hara go but then Linda and he get under heavy fire with hundreds of Special Ops, helicopters, etc., on their tale

- Gordon and Linda escape on a freighter across Atlantic to Europe and make their way to Kiev

- Adventures in Kiev (to be figured out). Guards help Gordon and Linda in battle against Ukrainian Special Forces.

- Eugene and the Russian Mafia help Gordon and Linda

- Gordon and Linda find Brell who created a full set of procedures to free anybody who wants to go free and get off this planet in a disembodied form as a spirit and dedicated his existence to rehabilitating Earth convicts and setting them free. That is why guards want him out, they do not want people to escape. But Brell is in hiding and refusing to go

- Brell is being defended and protected by the MPs who were supposed to find him and they did 2000 years ago and stayed with him ever since.

- O’Hara and Makamura and several other (bankers) former Priests are renegade Priests who do not want anybody from A5B escaping from Earth because they organize a banking conspiracy to usurp all power on Earth and playing their own power games. They don’t want any interference from the Empire or Confederacy. They know that Guards are offering the way out if anybody finds Brell so they are trying to prevent anybody from finding Brell. They are hunting Brell down trying to kill his body and degrade him as a spirit. Brell is powerful and he is defended by MPs

- Showdown between Brell and the renegade Priests. Gordon and Linda help Brell in battle. Brell wins but refuses to leave Earth and gets back to his compound to continue his work

- A contingent of A5B POWs fight with the Guards and take over their ship with great losses and difficulties, decimating the Guards. Linda and Gordon fight on their side. 6-8 survive, they want to escape without Brell

- Linda at the last moment refuses to leave Earth. Heart breaking goodbye to Gordon. Gordon finally stays too realizing that Linda and other Earth people are his people too. The space ship takes off without them.

- Gordon and Linda travel back to Brell to help him in his work or rehabilitating Earth convicts.