by Bryan Hurt
These men aren’t terrorists, they’re tourists!
The President of the Empire orders his drones to come home (he’s been missing them, the little darlings). The Defense Secretary looks at the Agency Director as if they’d just had coitus interruptus.
Before leaving The System’s Control Room, the President of the Empire inquires about the status of the PUIICP (Protocol on the Use of Irrelevant Information for Commercial Purposes). “It’s functioning at one hundred percent, Mr. President,” replies the System Director. “Prove it,” says the President of the Empire. “Don’t let those individuals get away.” The President of the Empire leaves, but then comes back and adds, “I don’t like that Tunisian being in Mexico. Poor little guy, if he really wants to live in freedom bring him here.” “As you wish, Mr. President,” the Agency Director answers.
To their astonishment and joy, over the following days João and Paulo start to see banners strewn all over the websites they visit, offering unbeatable deals on trips to the Himalayas. They receive personalized emails from travel agencies and airlines. The bank telephones to inform them that it has increased the limit on their credit cards.
Weeks later, João and Paulo go on holiday to Pakistan (spied on by Mossad agents). At the top of a modest mountain (not the K2, of course), João decides to leave his wife and Paulo feels happy in the knowledge that such an exotic trip gives him the right to twenty more years of sedentary life.
W.H. is offered a job in San Francisco.
Anyone, Somebody, and Someone receive their bonuses in delicious dollars.
The budget for The System, The Agency, and The Defense Department is increased as a result of the magnificent results of the PUIICP.
The President of the Empire orders the purchase of more drones, including one to deliver pizza to the Presidential Manor.
And they all lived happily ever after.
Safety Tips for Living Alone
by Jim Shepard
Twenty-five years before Texas Tower No. 4 became one of the Air Force’s most unlikely achievements and most lethal peacetime disasters, marooning each of nineteen Air Force wives including Ellie Phelan, Betty Bakke, Edna Kovarick, and Jeannette Laino in their own little stewpots of grief and recrimination, the six-year-old Ellie thought of herself as forever stuck in Kansas: someone who would probably never see Chicago, never mind the Atlantic Ocean. Her grandfather wore his old brown duster whatever the weather, and when he rode in her father’s convertible always insisted on sitting dead center in the back seat with a hand on each side of the top to maintain the car’s balance on the road. This was back when the army was running the Civilian Conservation Corps, the navy exploring the Pole with Admiral Byrd, and the air corps still flying the mail in open-cockpit biplanes. Gordon had reminded her of her grandfather, in a way that stirred her up and set her teeth on edge—she’d first noticed him when he’d stood up on the Ferris wheel before the ride had begun to make sure another family’s toddlers had been adequately strapped in—and her first words to him when they’d been introduced had been “Who made you the Ferris wheel monitor?” And when he’d answered with a grin, “Isn’t it amazing how much guys like me pretend we know what we’re doing?” she’d been shocked by how exhilarating it had been to catch a glimpse of someone who saw the world the way she did.
She’d always been moved and appalled by the confidence that men like her grandfather and Gordon projected when it came to getting a handle on their situations. But like her grandfather he’d had a way of responding to her as if she would come around to the advantages of his caretaking, and she’d surprised herself by not saying no when after a few months of dating he’d asked her to marry him. That night she’d stood in her parents’ room in the dark, annoyed at her turmoil, and had switched on their bedside lamp and told them the news. And when they’d reacted with some of the same dismay that she felt, she’d found herself more and not less resolved to go ahead with the thing.
Her father had pointed out that as a service wife she’d see exotic places and her share of excitement, but she’d also never be able to put down roots or buy a house and year after year she’d get settled in one place and have to disrupt her life and move to another. Her children would be dragged from school to school. Her husband would never earn what he could outside of the service. And most of all, the Air Force would always come first, and if that seemed too hard for her, then she should back out now.
When her mother came into her bedroom a few nights later and asked if she really did know what she was getting herself into, Ellie said that she did. And when her mother scoffed at the idea that her Ellie would ever know why she did anything, Ellie said, “At least I understand that about myself,” and her mother answered, “Well, what does that mean?” and Ellie said she didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
“Now that we see that you’re not going to change your mind, we give up,” her father announced a few days later, and she didn’t respond to that, either. His final word on the subject was that he hoped that this Gordon understood just how selfish she could be. She lived with her parents for two more months before the wedding and it felt like they exchanged maybe ten words in total. Her mother’s mother came for a visit and didn’t congratulate Ellie on her news but did mention that the military was no place for a woman because the men drank too much and their wives had to raise their children in the unhealthiest climates. She offered as an example the Philippines, that sinkhole of malaria and vice.
They were married by a justice of the peace in Gordon’s childhood home in Pasadena, and her parents came all the way out for the ceremony and left before the reception. They left behind as a wedding present a card that read Take care and all best wishes. Mom. The following week Gordon was posted to a base in Upstate New York and Ellie spent a baffled month alone with his parents and then took the Air Force Wives’ Special across the country: Los Angeles to Boston for $140, with stops everywhere from Fresno to Providence and seats as hard as benches and twenty infants and children in her compartment alone. The women traveling solo helped the mothers who were the most overwhelmed. Ellie spent the trip crawling under seats to retrieve crayons and shushing babies whose bottles were never the right temperature.
In Upstate New York the place Gordon found for her while they waited for quarters on the base was the kind of rooming house that had ropes coiled beneath the bedroom windows instead of fire escapes. She had only her room to herself, with kitchen privileges. “At least it’s quiet,” he told her when he first saw it, and then asked a few days later if her nightly headaches were related to what he’d said about her room.
She was at least relieved that he mostly served his time on the base. Larry was born, and Gordon worked his way up to captain, and when in 1957 he was offered the command of some kind of new offshore platform, he wanted to request another assignment—since what Air Force officer wanted to squat in a box over the ocean?—but he told Ellie that it was her decision, too. “You have a family, now,” she said. “I just want anything that keeps you closer.” “I wouldn’t get home any more often,” he told her. “And safer,” she said. So after sleeping on it he told her he’d take the command, though afterward he was so disappointed that he wasn’t himself for weeks.
By 1950 the Department of Defense had determined that the radars carried on navy picket ships and Air Force aircraft on station were not powerful enough to detect incoming Russian bombers sufficiently far offshore to enable fighter interception. The radar stations comprising the Distant Early Warning system arcing across the far north of the continent provided some security in that direction, but given that nearly all of America’s highest-priority targets were situated inside its northeastern metropolitan corridor, protection from an attack launched across the Atlantic seemed both essential and entirely absent. The Air Defense Command in response urgently ordered the Priority One construction of five platforms along the northeast coast in a line from Bangor to Atlantic City. The platforms were called Texa
s Towers because of their resemblance to the oil rigs, numbered from north to south, and cost $11 million apiece.
They faced engineering problems as unprecedented as the space program’s. Tower No. 4 in particular had presented a much greater challenge than the other towers since its footings would stand in 185 feet of water, more than three times as deep as the others. In 1955 the maximum depth at which anyone had built a structure under the sea was sixty feet, and that had been in the Gulf of Mexico. Because of that, the Air Force had decided that Tower 4 would require bold new thinking in its conception, and had hired a firm known for its bridge design. The firm had had no experience at all in the area of ocean engineering for marine structures.
Tower No. 4 stood on three hollow legs nearly three hundred feet long. The legs were only twelve feet in diameter and braced by three submarine tiers of thirty-inch steel struts. The main structure was a triangular triple-leveled platform that stood seventy feet above the waves. From its concrete footings on the seafloor to the top of its radomes it was the equivalent of a thirty-story building out in the ocean.
Oil-drilling platforms had weathered for the most part the storms and seas of the Gulf, but the Gulf at its worst was nothing like the North Atlantic.
And something was already wrong with Tower No. 4. Unlike the others it moved so much in heavy weather or even in a good strong wind that everyone who worked on it called it Old Shaky or the Tiltin’ Hilton.
The first time Gordon had set foot on it he’d stood at the edge of the platform hanging on to the rope railings designed to catch those blown off their feet by wind gusts or prop wash and had looked down into the waves so far below and out at the horizon empty in all directions and had said to the officer he was relieving, “What the hell am I doing here?”
The tower housed seventy men. Besides its crew and officer quarters and workstations it had a ward room, bakery, galley, mess, recreation area, and a sick bay. Seven locomotive-sized diesel engines provided electricity, and ionizing machines converted salt water to drinking water on the lower level. Fuel was stored in the hollow legs.
The crew was half Air Force personnel and half civilian welders or electricians or technicians. For every thirty days on you got thirty days off. The military guys liked it because they got more time than they were used to with their families, but the civilians hated the isolation, and complained they were always away for the big holidays. Everyone seemed to be stuck out on the platform for New Year’s and home for Groundhog Day.
But the tower shuddered and flexed so much in bad weather that whoever had painted Old Shaky over the door in the mess hall hadn’t even been able to paint it straight, and the floors moved so much in the winter that everyone was too seasick to eat. Ellie had heard from Gordon in his first phone call that the medic who’d flown out with him hadn’t served out his first day. When he’d seen how much the platform was pitching he’d refused to get off the helicopter and had taken the next flight out. Once he’d left, Gordon had found a crow hunkered down on the edge of the helipad, its tail feathers pummeled back in the wind. They got blown out here sometimes, the captain he’d been relieving had explained. Gordon boxed the crow up and carried it to his stateroom and then had seen to it that it was ferried back on the last copter out that night. “Well, at least the crow is safe,” Ellie said. “Unless he comes back,” her husband told her.
Betty Bakke’s husband Roy was one of the medics who hadn’t insisted on flying back to the mainland the first time he’d set foot on Tower No. 4, because he believed in fulfilling his responsibilities. He’d already made master sergeant and was two years older than the captain and nicknamed for his standard advice, which was Don’t Sweat It, as in, I thought I was coming down with something but Don’t Sweat It said I was okay. He’d transferred from the navy, where he’d served on a minesweeper during the Korean conflict. He told Betty in his phone calls that the only thing that fazed him was his separation from her. She was still stuck in their old bungalow in Mount Laguna on the other side of the country with their boy. Roy had put his friend and commanding officer Captain Phelan on the phone during one call, and the captain had regaled her with stories about Roy. Roy had stayed on duty eighty straight hours with an airman second class who’d had a heart attack, and he was even better known for having after a fall stitched up his own eyebrow while everyone had watched. He’d organized fishing contests off the deck and had also radioed passing trawlers so the guys could trade their cigarettes and beer for fresh fish and lobster. He’d also put himself in charge of the 16 mm movies traded from tower to tower and had scored big that Thanksgiving by having dealt The Vikings with Kirk Douglas for The Sheriff of Fractured Jaw with Jayne Mansfield. Betty had told the captain that her husband sounded like a one-man morale officer, and the captain had answered that that was what he’d been getting at. Betty had responded that she’d heard that long separations were the reefs that sank military marriages, and the captain had laughed and had said that he was going to pass the phone back to her husband. “Sounds like she needs a house call,” she heard him say to Roy.
The Navy Bureau of Yards and Docks had advised that the platform would need to withstand winds up to 125 miles per hour and breaking waves up to thirty-five feet, based on twenty years of data provided by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The main deck’s seventy-foot elevation should then provide plenty of clearance. A few engineers on the design team dissented, wishing to put on the record their belief that wave heights and wind speeds should be calculated on the basis of what might be expected once a century rather than once every twenty years. They were outvoted.
To extend its radar coverage Tower No. 4 had been given a location as close as possible to the very edge of the continental shelf, which meant that just to its east the bottom dropped away thousands of feet, and waves coming from the north or east encountered that rising bottom and mounted themselves upward even higher. And in the winter storms it had weathered, Tower No. 2, in much shallower water, had already recorded waves breaking over its deck.
But wait, Gordon told Ellie once he’d done a little more research: the news got even worse. Because the footings were so deep, Tower No. 4’s hollow legs had been designed to be towed to their location, where they’d be upended and anchored to the caissons on the bottom before the main deck was attached and raised. But because the legs had been so long the design engineers had had to use pin connections—giant bolts—rather than welds in the underwater braces. Bolts were an innovative solution, but as a modification failed to take into account the constant random motion of the sea. The oil rigs and the other two towers had used welded connections for that reason. The moment the bolts had gone in, they had begun generating impact stress around their connections. And Gordon had further discovered that during the towing a storm had so pummeled two of the legs’ underwater braces that they’d sheared off and sunk during the upending, and that everyone had then floated around until the Air Force had finally given the order to improvise repairs at sea to avoid having to tow the entire structure back to shore. Then in the swells the five-thousand-ton main platform had kept smashing up against the legs, and so reinforced steel had been flown out and welded to the legs over the damage. “Okay, I think it’s time to put in for a change of assignment,” Ellie told him in response to that news. “Yeah, well, in for a penny, in for a pound,” her husband had responded, by which she took him to mean, You got me into this, so I don’t want any complaints.
As soon as the tower had gone operational Wilbur Kovarick had asked to be assigned to it as senior electrician so he could be closer to his family on Long Island, and Edna had been so grateful that she’d kept him in bed the entire weekend.
By the time Edna had turned twenty-six all of her friends but two had married and she had been a bridesmaid five times. She’d told Wilbur on their first date that at the last wedding if the clergy-man had dropped dead at the altar she could have taken over the service. He’d been sweet and had thought she was a rio
t but after they had said good night she had found herself back in her little rented room with no radio or television and her three pots of ivy wishing that she’d thought to get his home address or telephone number. By the time he had called back she had had no patience for pretense and had told him to come over and when he had appeared at her door she had kissed him until he had finally pulled his face away and she had pressed her cheek to his and had said, “I’m not fast; I just know what I want,” and after a moment he had squeezed her even harder than she was squeezing him. Their first apartment after their marriage had been so small that one of them could get dressed in their bedroom only if the other stayed in bed, and Wilbur had joined the Air Force so they’d send him to electricians’ school.
He told her that without him the whole tower went dark and the gigantic antennae stopped spinning and she answered that that was the way she felt, too. He told her that when the diesels altered their outputs at odd intervals, the voltage changes caused the radar transmitters to sound their alarms, and every single time the threat had to be assessed, the alarm had to be silenced, the transmitter readjusted, the alarm reset, and a Threat Assessment Report filled out. Some nights he was up nineteen hours straight. Then he was so wired that he called her when he went off-duty and talked. He told her that the wind chill was so bad some days that in the sun and behind some shelter he’d be sweating in a T-shirt but then out in the wind, water would freeze in a bucket. He told her that the space heater she’d insisted he take had made his part of the bunk room a big gathering spot, and that he’d also gotten a reputation as a good egg because instead of filing a report about an airman second class who’d dropped a transmitter drawer he’d spent the night repairing it himself so he wouldn’t get the guy in trouble. She asked if he’d made any friends, and though it disappointed her, he said no, not yet, and there was an awkward pause, and then he added that he had been getting a kick out of one of the divers who was always sucking helium out of a tank and then telling everyone “Take me to your leaders” like he was the man from outer space.
