THE COWARDLY LION, Volume Six, Chapter XII

I sat thinking while inside the Jeep while Marlowe waited to find out if he was to live or die.  There was no real decision to make. His firing at me, even though he wasn’t a sniper, should have taken me out earlier, no matter how I dodged and squirmed.  Short-range shooting of a long-range gun, scoped in and properly loaded, was almost impossible to escape, as deer hunters proved season after season.  Finding or hunting down a deer is a much bigger deal than shooting and killing it unless shots are taken at extreme range.  No matter what Marlowe might say, which always had to be questioned, the physical results of the attempted shooting did seem to speak for themselves. I remained uninjured.

Marlowe’s fear was also convincing.

“You leave with what’s being offered, or it all ends here,” I said to him.

“I understand,” Marlowe answered, “but what about my mom?

His mom.  I shrank back into myself to consider something that hadn’t occurred to me.  Phil Marlowe was of Spanish descent, and those of that old country origin did not leave the older generations behind them or uncared for.  I understood what he was saying, even though I didn’t want to respond to it.

“I’m not going to kill you, although with such a weak defense as you have, that might be the wise thing to do.  That you have a mother here was the right thing to mention, however strange that sounds.”

“Then what?” Marlow said, his tone of voice one of anguish. “You’re trying to drive me insane or mentally incapacitate me in some weird way.”  He leaned his head down and put his face into his hands.

I examined him closely, knowing that I was no longer seeing him as a threat.

“You said those words, different words, complex words,  and in saying them, there was no Spanish accent.  What was that?” I asked, in true wonder.

“I’m good with languages…since I was a child,” he answered, which really wasn’t much of an answer at all.

I stared, and then waited.

“I’m from Cuba, and the language there is all over the place.  People here think Cubans speak Spanish, which they do, but they mix Taino into everything.”

“What the hell is Tiano?” I asked, still in a state of wonder about what the man was saying.

The mess of what I thought Marlowe was was wrong.  He was a mess, I now understood, a culturally mixed mess.

“Tiano was the language of the entire Caribbean island complex before the Spanish came. It’s used as a bridge.  Like Latin is used in English, he said.

“How’s that?” I got out, feeling like I was losing control of my potentially terminal interview with the man.

“Latin,” Marlowe whispered, raising his head to look up and stare straight ahead of him through the windshield, as if I wasn’t there.  “Think of a triangle.

What is it and what does it mean?  Tri is three in Latin, and angle is English for two lines or two anything meeting at an apex.  So, triangle means three angles, but it’s only one short word instead of all this.”

I was being schooled by someone I could not identify, as what sat next to me gave every indication of being a drug-taking and drug-dealing attempted assassin and worse.  There was a lot more to Marlowe than I’d been willing to admit, and that made me uncomfortable.

“Who the hell are you, really?” I asked, finally hoping to reach some bottom or answer that made any sense at all.

“Who the hell are you, really?”  He shot right back.

“Just a damaged man working at self-repair on a very active daily and nightly plan that’s not much of a plan of my own making at all,” I replied, telling him the truth.

Marlowe smiled and looked over at me before beginning to laugh out loud.

“We are so much the same but so terribly different,” he said, before quieting and letting a silence hang between us like an invisible cloud.

“How did this Sofia FBI agent person reach Hans Bethe, his tech area, and uncover the potential of these offices to collect what’s supposed to be out here with respect to UFOs?”

“It’s out here,” Marlowe said, but then went on.  “Sofia is counterintelligence investigating that Los Alamos tech area where one of the scientists is taking home top-secret information on a laptop every day or night, since they seem to work upside-down hours in that science fiction setting.”

“Do you have any weaponry here?” I asked, beginning to believe what the man was telling me, but not totally.

“I could run, hide, escape by hitting the road…Or I could come here and face this moment, except I have no place to run to, escape to, or drive to that’s worth pursuing.  I’m here, unarmed, because it’s the only place I felt I had a right and necessity to be in, giving me any chance to live.”

“You are, indeed, a bit of a linguistic expert.  Let me reword my question.  Is there any other weapon nearby, other than the one I’m holding?”  I didn’t point the gun at him while I spoke, trying to give him some kind of accommodation.

“Glove compartment,” he replied, and then looked at it.

I pushed the button to open the compartment, but nothing happened.

“It’s locked,” I said.

“Wrong button, reach underneath,” he grunted out, leaning over to push up underneath the dashboard.

The glove compartment door sprang open, revealing only one thing: a long, slim silver tube with a plastic handle and trigger assembly.

“That’s it? I asked in surprise, pulling the cheap Asian-made instrument out of the compartment.  “What’s it in here for?”

I held a real weapon in one hand and a fire-starter I was almost certain would be a weapon, but wasn’t, in the other.  I looked over at Marlowe and then waited, knowing now that he was not the overweight Hispanic macho man he appeared to be.

“You’re into ballooning, so I figured you’d need that at some point,”

Marlowe said, stopping me in my tracks for a few seconds.

Once again, I was shocked at what came out of the man’s mouth unexpectedly.  How could he have any idea about my ballooning with Kris Anderson and what kind of taint such knowledge might place on my family, friends, and the entire social order I was trying to become a part of in Albuquerque?

“An igniter for the balloon?” I asked, not stopping to think about what a dumb question it was to ask.  “The propane comes through a valve and passes over a pilot light and then nearly explodes into ferocious fire, heating the air lifts the balloon.  What would I need an igniter for?

“You’re new at ballooning, but I’ve been around for a while,” Marlow said, laughing for the first time.

“Yes?”  I asked, still irritated by the man’s ability to steer and drive the conversation.

“Early in the morning, when the envelope is all laid out and down, the basket attached and secure, the chase and fly crews prepped and ready, the burners atop the basket are angled and cold air is blown over them to inflate the envelope partially.  Yes?”  he asked…and waited.

“Yes,” I replied, following along.

“Then the cold air fan is turned off, the gas is turned on,  but not before ignition can take place…” Marlowe said, stopping talking and looking into my eyes.

I stared down at the cheap, crummy device in my left hand.

“The pilot light has to be lit,” I finished, saying the words as if I was reading them from a script.

I looked down at the .44, noting the custom grips I’d paid an artisan to make for me from Purple Heart wood, and settled it by my side.  Marlowe would not die by my hand or gun unless he demanded to be killed by me.  He didn’t look the role he was filling, but neither did I.  He didn’t obey hard and fast rules, but neither did I.  He was working to make money for his mother and family, just like I was.  I could never say the words aloud, but I knew what they’d sound like if I did.  We were brothers.  UFO stuff was relevant, not because of the potential existence of a living alien species possibly visiting, but because it was as far out of believability as the blatant fact that I, Nguyen, Kingsley, Marlow, Quincy, and even Marcinko were cut from almost the same cloth.  We were aliens stacked up, not against, our fellow homo sapiens, but to be the point.  We existed to set off the booby traps or hidden mines and explosives in life to ensure that those who followed, unknowingly, would not be sacrificed simply because they did not know.  I could no longer apply myself to taking Marlowe out, so no more searching for weapons was necessary.

“Let’s get out and see if we can find the object of someone’s intention,” I said, carefully placing the Magnum into the glove compartment with the igniter.

Flank security was out on both wings with Nguyen and Kingsley, while the wild card, Quincy, was behind the wheel of the Rover in the distance.  This time, no matter what, I didn’t think he’d run like he did last time, but then I’d run under fire that first time in the A Shau Valley, too.

The sun was up, and its radiating power blinded me to almost everything around, although that blinding did nothing to remove the beauty of the scene.  The ice wasn’t white, it was clear with a blue tint on the pine needles and pinon branches.  The snow was pure white but pocked with tiny bowls of melting water here and there.  Soon, the desert floor would be a mixture of sandy mud, plant debris, and whatever else was scattered around the area.

From somewhere, as he’d climbed out of the truck, Marlowe found a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses.  They looked great on him, but I said nothing.  I wasn’t about to take his glasses because my own squinting was bothersome.   Wearing sunglasses as an agent in the field, I’d been told by Tony Herbert, made the eyes dependent on such protection and that meant under difficult circumstances, when sunglasses might not be available, that the advantage would go to anyone whose eyes were conditioned so as not to need them to survive.

I moved to the bush where Marlowe indicated the object might be buried under the snow, but the snow was disappearing so fast that there wasn’t really that much left on the ground.  The broom and shovel were in the Rover, and I wasn’t going to cross the distance to where Quincy sat waiting to get them.

“Here, it’s here,” Marlowe said, pulling a wedge-shaped object up out of the snow.  He examined it, turning it slowly in his bare hands as neither of us had gloves. I approached to examine it closer.

“It’s rough as hell,” I said, not moving to touch it as my eyes followed every twist and turn of its metallic surface, a surface cross-hatched with erosion, rust, or other decaying process eating away at it.

“This is the thing,” Marlowe said, inserting his left hand, balled into a fist, through a hole near the wedge’s center.   It was the only part of the object that was clearly machined metal, as the circular, curved edges of the hole were polished through and through.

Marlowe brushed the last remnants of snow and ice from the wedge and then handed it to me.

It wasn’t as heavy as it looked, but it was strange.  I couldn’t place the strangeness, though.  Ten to maybe twelve pounds in weight and with no sharp features, it seemed like it could be a piece of flotsam or debris tossed to the side of a road by a passing truck, except for the feeling.  The feeling that I shouldn’t let it go.  I hugged it against my chest, but nothing happened.

“Do you?”  I said, but got no farther.

“Yes,” Marlowe hissed out, backing away a few feet, “I feel it and want nothing to do with it.  Evil or demon or something, because no piece of metal can make anybody feel anything.  It’s not right.  I’ll do whatever you want, but not this, never this.”

He pointed at the object I was holding.  I felt no evil.  I felt attachment, but wasn’t bothered by the feeling, and then I wondered why that didn’t bother me.  Marlowe was, after all, correct.  It wasn’t right in the universe.  I realized why I was okay with that. I was already conditioned by my own artifact.  That very same feeling had come over me whenever I possessed it.  My hand was scarred from that contact years earlier.  There was a link there between the moon artifact and this object, although it was unfathomably arcane to try to conceive of.  I understood why Dr. Bethe wanted to explore discovering more and opening the floodgates of real capital to pursue it.

“Let’s get this wrapped up and turn it over to the lab,” I said, carrying the object toward the Jeep and waving toward Quincy to pull up the Rover.  I assumed that Nguyen and Kingsley would pack up the M60 since they could obviously see from their position that there would be no fire to contend with.

Marlowe and I headed over to get back inside the Jeep.  Despite the sun’s intensity, it was still pretty biting cold outside.

“You’re going to Colombia or somewhere with the DEA, and now I know you are not the Phillip Marlowe I thought I knew,” I said, staring into the man’s dark eyes as I jammed the object down behind my seat.

Marlowe paid no attention to the object at all.

“What am I supposed to do with them, since they hate me?” He replied.

“Help them,” I said, with meaning.

“Help them do what?” he replied, an unsettled tone in his voice.  I knew the object disturbed him.  My introduction to the artifact had done the same thing to me.  Sort of like having God appear and instruct you to do something or even nothing.  The very revaluation that God was real would destroy just about every fundamental belief of everything, no matter what discussion took place.

“They don’t know what you know about what’s going on, so try to educate them, even though they will not be receptive or probably capable of working at your level.  If you keep being right about things, you will slowly gain leadership, and then you also get freedom.”

“Everyone wants me dead,” Marlowe replied.  “Those cretins over on that stupid windmill island, the CIA, the local police, and even the DEA.”

“If everyone wanted you dead, then why didn’t I do the job for all or any of them right here?”

“You’re not quite right in the head,” Marlowe stated, but then couldn’t help but laugh.

The Rover drove slowly toward us, no doubt loaded with Nguyen, Kingsley, and Quincy loaded for bear, hyper-sensitive and ready for anything.

“Those guys you hang out with don’t look dangerous at all,” Marlowe mused as I got ready to get the object and head across the few feet to where the Rover idled.

“Neither do I,” I said back, in truth.

I opened the passenger door, pulled the object out, and then pulled the Magnum from the glove compartment.

“They’ll come for you, so go with them.  This is your big chance in life. Take it, it’s about all the advice and help I can give you, and that’s for wisely not shooting me when you had the chance.”

“Con Dios, eres pelegros, amigo,” Marlowe said before turning the key and starting the Jeep’s engine.

“Kingsley had the rear passenger window down as Marlowe drove away.

“What did he say in Spanish?” he asked.

“Con Dios, is idiomatic for ‘go with God,’ I replied, opening the front door and getting the object situated before clambering in.`

“No, the other part,” Kingsley said.

“You are dangerous,” is the literal translation,” I replied.

“Why’d he say that?”

“You had to kind of be there for the conversation, Ben,” I said, cutting him off.  “Let’s roll to the base as they’ll want this bit of science fiction aboard a chopper and out of their hands as fast as they can.”

Kingsley changed places with Quincy and drove all of us to the base.  The old buildings that had been there when I’d come to Albuquerque were gone, now replaced by glass and steel structures not as large but more capable of handling the new series of private jets and turbine helicopters being built.  Outside the largest structure sat three CH-53 choppers.  They were static, in that there were no crewmen around or any obvious preparations for a flight or departure of any kind.

There were two airmen on duty at a small desk as the four of us walked into the structure.  I pulled the object out of the Rover and carried it under my left arm before walking up to the senior airman, a man in uniform wearing shoulder patches with two stripes up and six down, with a star in the center.  I knew those stripes meant he was an E-8, although I didn’t know what the rank was called in the Air Force. In the Marines, it would be a master gunnery sergeant.  I reached my back pocket, got my wallet, and took out the aging Marine Corps I.D. card, which still showed me as a 1^st Lieutenant. I held it out for him to examine.

He stared at it for a few seconds, without seeming to take it in or really read what was on it, as far as I could tell.

“This is odd,” he finally said, coming to his feet but not saluting or calling me sir.

“You need to call a number and then do what they tell you to do when you talk to them,” I said, reaching down to the desktop, taking a cheap U.S. government ballpoint pen lying there, and writing a telephone number on a discarded napkin left atop it.

The sergeant looked down at the surface of the napkin and sat back down.

“Los Alamos number?” he asked, his forehead wrinkling up.

“I reckon so,” I said, remembering how the screenwriter of The Outlaw Josey Wales had his character speak to gain effect beyond words.

The sergeant pulled his ‘piss cutter’ narrow cap off his head, scratched, and then replaced it.  I was reminded of how smokers tended to use a cigarette in the same way.  A few seconds delay to think, without it looking like one is taking a few seconds to reflect or think.  Only the Army and Air Force wore covers inside, I knew.  It didn’t bother me, but it always seemed strange, as the Navy and Marine Corps personnel always carefully removed covers to enter a building and never saluted unless under cover, which meant never indoors unless armed and wearing leather gear.

I waited patiently, not knowing what to expect.  As far as I was concerned, I’d be just as happy to toss the object out into the remains of the snow and ice outside as I would be getting it off to Los Alamos.

The sergeant pulled the napkin closer and then picked up the receiver from its old Bakelite base and dialed the number.  He didn’t say anything for a few seconds, avoiding looking up at me standing in front of him.

“I’m here at Kirtland with two gentlemen carrying a piece of what looks like a small freezer door and calling this number as instructed,” he said, looking across the inside of the spacious hangar and then waiting.

He listened or held the phone to his ear, appearing to listen for a good five minutes, before hanging it up without speaking another word into it.

“You’re him,” he said.

I didn’t say anything, following my two old insurance sales masters, Bartok and Thorkelson, who’d taught me to answer specific questions but to let statements speak for themselves or not at all.

“Airman, collect that sample the man’s holding.  We’ve got to get a crew a loach and get this up to Los Alamos toot sweet.”

I knew a ‘loach’ was what most ‘airdales’ called the Hughes single or twin-turbine small reconnaissance helicopter.  It was small and very fast but limited in range.  It could do the run to Los Alamos and back, though, or I assumed.

“We’re done here,” the sergeant said to me, looking at me intensely for the first time.

“Who do you think I am?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.

“Him,” the sergeant immediately replied.

I turned and walked back to the Rover and got it.

As soon as the Rover was underway again, I instructed Kingsley to head for the office.

“What did he mean by saying you were him?” he asked as he drove.

“Me,” I replied, looking out through the windshield and wondering what the man might have heard come through the telephone’s receiver.

Kingsley let it go, instead hitting the radio button.

The lyrics of a Rod Stewart song radiated out from the Rover’s many speakers: “…If I listened long enough to you, I’d find a way to believe that it’s all true, knowing that you lied, straight-faced, while I cried, still I look to find a reason to believe…”

We rode in silence, my thoughts returning to the comfort and peace of being in the basket of a hot air balloon and skimming across the surface of the melting desert around us.

The phone rang as I walked into the office, as Pat witnessed my return and punched it through.  I looked at the blinking red button and wondered if it was Herbert, already filled in by Marlowe, and maybe questioning my judgment to let him live.

But it wasn’t Herbert.

“Hello,” I asked.

“Is this you?” the female voice asked back,

I thought for a few seconds.   The voice sounded familiar.

“What the hell,” I whispered to myself, then turned back to the receiver.

“Yes, it is.”

“I would like that job,” the voice said, not giving me any more.

My mind raced.  What job?  When had I offered a job, and to whom?  And then it hit me.  The woman at the diner.

“What job do you want to have?” I asked, wondering how to answer that question for myself.  Pat was gifted at what she did, but she didn’t like me.  I didn’t require it of the position, however, and it was hard to find people who could accommodate an office staffed by half real insurance agents and then half by whacked-out field agents as well.

“That’s for you to decide.  I’m going with you wherever you’re going to yu decide.  Leave a message at the diner here of where you want me to go and when you want me to show up.”

“Don’t you want to know about pay and benefits?” I got out before I found myself talking to a dead phone.

I couldn’t remember the name of the diner, or the woman, and I cursed myself for not taking any notes.  My memory was so good, but when overwhelmed would fail me on details from time to time that I knew would reappear as I lay in bed or got up in the morning, but by the,n probably be too late.  I‘d made a promise to a woman who had helped me at a very vulnerable moment, and there was no letting her down. I called in Pat.

“Pat, I made a promise to somebody that there’d be a job available,” I began, thinking about how to explain the situation to her.

“Yes, he’s here waiting to see you,” she answered, before walking out of my office and heading down the hall.

“He?” I said, out loud, as I went after her.

“He’s in the conference room,” she said, opening the heavy walnut door to allow me to see John Nash sitting at the table, enjoying a cup of coffee.

I stopped at the table a few chairs from him and leaned down, turning my head to instruct Pat that she needed to call Kingsley and get him to the office.

“Thanks for coming, John,” I began, wondering where I was going to go with the conversation.

“What’s the job?” John asked, acting like a bumpkin but I knew he was anything but that, coming out of Caltech and having ridden the back seat of a Phantom in Vietnam.

“Kingsley’s in the parking lot,” Pat said, leaning around the edge of the open door.  “You want him in here?”

No, the new woman wasn’t getting Pat’s job.  I didn’t like Pat any more than she liked me, but she was the cutting edge and also understood that the rules she so rigidly wanted obeyed and enforced in opposition to the way I saw such things as slippery stretchables bent and twisted around real objects and beings in ways that made life workable.

I glanced at her and blinked once, and she was gone.  No, the new woman would not get her job, much less the fact that the diner woman was too good-looking.  My wife didn’t particularly care for my having beautiful employees unless they were males.

“Well,” John said, in a sort of southwestern Texas drawl.

Kingsley walked into the room, pulled out the chair next to Nash, and stuck out his hand.

“Welcome aboard,” he said, with his insidious native Indian smile.

John shook his hand, but his expression was one of surprise.

“Okay, John,” you’re hired.  We’ll do the details, benefits, and all that sort of paperwork later.  Ben, you take John to the diner on the west side of town and find the woman who helped me.  She wants a job.  Tell her she has one.  John, you accompany Ben here, with the woman, to the shooting range on Kirtland.  I want you to give her a Colt automatic and then teach her how to shoot it, or at least be introduced to it.”

“Jesus Christ,” Nash said, putting his coffee cup down.  “I wasn’t ready for this.”

“I have a question, John Nash, new employee, agent, and operative, in the job you so badly have been seeking, why are you still here?”

I got up and walked out.  I was going to Anderson’s to see if we could get his AX-11 into the air anytime soon.  My head felt like it would explode with the complexities I was facing.  In the A Shau, I’d run under fire, hidden under fire, disobeyed orders under fire, and I was alive and declared to be a hero.  It wasn’t my fault that the world, the universe, was that out of sync.  I needed clean, thin, and cold air to clear my mind.

Kingsley chased me down the hall.

“What do you want to do with the woman?” he asked.

“See if she flinches under fire.  I don’t have a secretarial position for her. That won’t work.  I’ve got to have her in the field, but if she can’t quickly figure out what’s in front of her, then I don’t have time to turn her from an FNG into a vet.  She’s either all in or out, her choice.”

“I don’t have a Colt automatic,” Nash yelled down the hall.

“And find him a .45, will you?”

I walked to the door, trying to get to the parking lot and maybe get into the air with Kris Anderson,  a great guy totally removed from the maelstrom I was living my life inside.