by Randy Moffat
Eventually Li’s fiction to settle the dodderer down was that Po had not been exiled . . . merely reassigned to an important post in America. Po, Li revealed, was actually the new head of operations. Po grabbed onto the fiction, swelling in fantasy importance. Li described his new duties to Po and he grabbed at them desperately. Po was to review intelligence reports, small gems garnered from the intelligence mines and using his unique insights to polish them into bright stones of understanding and pass them on to the bosses in China.
Li was no fool. He understood the desperate nature of the old man. On the occasions when the liquor store was closed and Po was capable of thought he actually came to believe he was value added in this invented process. Li sent him reports from his long established network of agents. He then scribbled in largely incomprehensible notes that passed for his own analytical efforts and shoved the whole lot along the pipeline to China. This arrangement survived because people drinking from the long hose of information back in China misunderstood and thought Po was actually doing something. The reports now carried his signature. Li did nothing to change that understanding . . . and did everything else instead. Po began to get increasing points back home for solid workmanship while Li’s named faded from the frontal lobes of the powers that be—which was exactly what Li wanted. He had erected the straw man Po from nothing and put him where both Chinese intelligence and western counter-intelligence would mistake him for the man in charge.
In this way Li acquired Po. The bandit Po still slept with a pistol in his pants and a mindless desire to use it in turbulent times—times that China, the wild west of the east had seen all too much of for three quarters of a century. Those times had faded away in Asia. While the world evolved while Po lived on in his Michigan hovel like some Dugong or Kiwi, a hothouse remnant of a time gone by teetering there on the fulcrum of extinction from either age or stupidity.
Meantime, Li disappeared into and lived the American dream. He prospered as a co-owner of several patents on computer hardware and software. Ironically, the communist was making a capitalist pile in the heart of American industry.
Li’s success at disappearing was almost his undoing. His legerdemain should have been a perfect plus for a covert agent but game theory intruded. Over the years China had also mostly forgotten he existed behind his cloak of Poian invisibility. The personnel who Li himself had dealt with in China faded away. He had become a cipher in the world of espionage. Worse he had himself evolved. He was increasingly aware that he had became so much a part of his North American persona, blended chameleon like to the wallpaper of US society that insidiously at some moment he could not put his finger on he discovered that he no longer really liked China very much. Time had gifted him with virtually no desire to return to the horrible clutter and the overcrowded teeming multitudes that he distantly recalled of Asia. Age mellowed wine and Li’s vintage had softened from the hard beeswing of communism to complacent appreciation for the vintage tannin of low level socialism that filled the wine cellar of America. With a little dough you could have a car the size of Mississippi and a truly enormous house all to yourself in the US. It was comfortable. Li never had to share a bathroom. As he aged Li had discovered that being alone and reading peacefully on the pottie was really what humans most want.
The decisive events in Li’s current crisis happened quickly. In a matter of three short years Li found himself in an awkward position in both China and the US. In the US he was an east coast man and all the real computer action had now firmly shifted to the west coast. Two years ago a Young Turk under orders from Beijing had taken charge in Silicon Valley and cut Li out of the action in California—establishing a Chinese western division for intelligence collection. Li was now isolated from West coast developments by an energetic and capable new spy organization which he did not influence. This happened just as the Eastern field of computer espionage had gone fully fallow. In the eighties and nineties Li’s tidbits of information had been second to none, suddenly his information was second rate and second hand compared to the west coast reports.
Increasing exponentially the effect of this loss of relevance was dizzying political changes back in the Chinese capital. He would not have been the least concerned his isolation during the glacial pace of events during the era of hard line communism. Changed times and the current age of Sino pseudo-capitalism meant that market forces were now suddenly at work in China too. That was trouble.
Drinking a mint julep on his porch one day it crashed down on him suddenly that his own carefully erected life and lifestyle was now at risk. If the new bosses held up the dramatic results of the west and east coasts for the last several years side by side, Li’s production would be a distant second. Any solid Nuevo-capitalist, with an eye towards cost-cutting could end everything with the slash of a pen on a spreadsheet—eliminating the new weak link that Li headed. He could catch a faint whiff of a recall that could and would happen at any time.
Recall was the real problem. Espionage personnel were universally ordered home if their relevance was at an end. If the de-commissioning hammer fell he would not be summarily fired through a nasty e-mail like any descent profession. Intelligence personnel knew too much. They must be brought home. Any recalled mole must be made to stand in front of a desk, receive a hero of socialism medal and be retired quietly to a people’s rest home. If Li refused to softly return when summoned to the slums of Canton and the obscurity of genteel poverty on a government pension, then the spy masters must feel called upon to act. They had a bad habit of sending the message again—this time written on a bullet to prevent the errant mole from writing a best-selling tell-all expose that might embarrass everyone.
Blinded by the epiphany that the end was nigh, the years of pain in keeping Po hanging about hoping for to find a purpose for him were suddenly going to be paid back. He needed the old man now in the same way the Iranians needed land mine detectors with shoes. He had a plan to use old Po to spy out the lay of the new political landscape that had formed tectonically back in China. Po would perform a final reconnaissance for Li. All Li needed was something to make Li relevant again and act as the trigger mechanism for a personal report. It would be a report with enough meat in it that it would make a recall impossible.
Li had been forming the plan for some time, but had not been ready before. Then fortuitously a source that he had turned at Redstone arsenal a decade before had suddenly roused itself from slumber and indicated that something new was up in Alabama. Li’s initial investigation made him realize that he had probably found the lever that would save his ass.
His plan was very Chinese. Sacrifice Po the cat’s paw to make Li safe.
He smiled to himself.
Li thanked the Tao that he had kept Po out of a pine box and available for this moment . . . . even if the old bastard was a constant migraine waiting to happen.
CHAPTER 3—Q-KINK KOMMAND
It took seven weeks to assemble the full team. It was the pencil drawing on a scrap of paper that told Bear that the team was a team. Some wag had created, Xeroxed and widely distributed a caricature cartoon of Bear, John Wong and Maureen O’Hara engaged in a dubious ménage a trios wherein a leather clad Bear cracked a whip over the half clothed forms of the other two while they pulled a wagon full of interrogatives and atomic symbols while vague outlines of cursing team members pushed the cart from behind. Judging by the sweaticles dripping from the team’s foreheads in the cartoon, the cartful of questions marks was heavy. The caption read ‘The Kinky Kommands of Herr MacMoran’ in bold letters. Two days after publication of the lampoon, the three of them had been quietly dubbed ‘Q-Kink Kommand’ by the now almost fully grown group who used the name as a noun to describe the trio with increasing frequency. Bear framed his copy and hung it prominently on the wall near his desk in a corner of the Anglewood cave complex. Most of the lashings he administered involved his tongue rather than a whip, but the grain of truth about t
heir organization had too much merit—so he hid it in plain view.
The team growth was a result of Bear’s brand of shuttle diplomacy and Wong’s occasional spare moment of random recruiting as the pair raced about the country collecting people like a belly button gathers lint.
Bear had no particular preference for engaging military personnel; it was simply easier to acquire them quickly since their security standing was generally better known than that of civilian counterparts. Front and center in the team was an Army Sergeant First Class named Baxter who had served as an Operations Non-Commissioned Officer in most of the foreign policy adventure hot zones of the last two decades. He was a ‘get ‘r done’ kind of guy who wasn’t afraid to use his hands until dirty and even bleeding a little as long as his people’s were doing it with him. A natural leader whose command of curses was eye opening and he was able to use ‘fuck’ as every part of speech in a kind of repetitive verbal sleight of hand. Luckily his real value wasn’t swearing but the ability to finish a job fast and he ruthlessly organized things as if his genes demanded it of him. Under him they had put together a small cadre of naturally hard working enlisted military personnel they had acquired willy-nilly. The ‘mils’ as the civilians sometimes called them included an Air force Technical Sergeant named Rivera who had wide communications systems expertise, a crusty reserve Marine Gunnery Sergeant Killien who was a machinist on both the civilian and military side . . . nominally the same rank as Baxter though he showed no indication of fighting Baxter for the Alpha male position There was also a geeky and awkward looking Naval Petty Officer Second Class named Maxmillian who looked like a giant black panda bear and somehow knew everything there was to know about electricity. He was hired the same day as Army Staff Sergeant Pinta. Pinta looked like a stubby weight lifter but came from a background of aviation allied shops and handled fabrication in every kind of material from plexi-glass to steel with unstudied ease. Wong had also added an Air Force buck Sergeant named Melisa Anderson and an army Specialist Alesandra Diaz under the title ‘general project support.’
“Someone has to drive the damn truck.” Wong had explained.
Bear had seen the sense of it instantly if only because they were both decidedly female and the prospect of working day in and day out buried in a cavern full of cave men was too depressing to contemplate. Diaz at least had softer female planes to her face and was rather attractive with jet black skin but she was an undoubted jock. She was tough and could outrun most of the men on a two mile course. Anderson on the other hand was softer and rounder . . . she could have passed for a rather square jawed blond sports model—though luckily she seemed not very conscious of her good looks and worked herself hard instead of worrying about breaking a nail.
Despite the fact that two of these seven were women, in the Tartarus of Anglewood the eclectic collection of the military side had collectively become known simply as “The boys.” Through the Brownian motion of group dynamics the boys had somehow come to regard O’Hara as their protective mother. They obeyed Bear and Wong with precision and effort, but the XO and Bear noticed that when O’Hara muttered a command they snapped to instantly and that a harsh word from her could cause any of them to hang their head and mope likely a beaten dog for two days.
In addition to the “Boys” Q-kink had accumulated four civilians who had past existences as military personnel or government civilians and thus had TS clearances like the boys. One was a portly endomorph named Gaston who Wong loved dearly as soon as they met since he had almost the same skill set as the XO and could handle power and communications systems with equal dexterity as well as an exhaustive knowledge of California wines and bass fishing. He was one of those men who loved bass fishing to the point of annoyance, talking about the tournaments he had entered and won until he took on the fishy attribute of trout out of the water for three days, but he was so utterly reliable, talented and helpful that it made up for his aquatic peccadillo. A second civilian was an innocuous looking thin woman named Woo of unclear Asian ancestry and age who they had stolen from their visit to Sugar Grove. She had impressed them during their brief visit with her know-how around satellite systems and actually communicated in binary. Woo was limited to two answers . . . yes and no unless you pressed her technical specialty button where she would babble endlessly. The third ‘civvie’ was a quietly skilled white haired former employee of Martin Marietta’s R&D department, a practical female electrical engineer named Johnson whose wide design experience that Bear thought so general that it might come in handy and he snapped her up. He also liked her. The last civilian was a dour man with thick glasses and an anal personality named Van Ziegler who was their new computer chief. He was not much fun to be around, having a joyless personality and an obsessive need to dot the i’s. Bear never actually saw him smile, but he knew his business and could hack up a piece of bridge script code in a flash. For some unstated and obscure reason, the foursome of Gaston, Woo, Johnson, and Van Zeigler regarded Wong as their direct boss and looked naturally to him for guidance and direction—ignoring direction from anyone else without a lot of effort. Privately Bear had called them “Wongers” and someone had overheard it because lately he had overheard it being used by the enlisted personnel to refer to the quartet.
This left the ‘Eggheads’ as the rest of the group called them affectionately. They were the three physicists of the group. If the ‘Wongers’ were the skilled hands of the team, and the “Boys’ were its backbone, the “Eggheads’ were meant to be its brain—and a schizophrenic brain it was. Petrovski was the youngest with his black cloths, long hair and face jewelry; the second was Mohammed Aziz, a forty year old mathematician with touch of obsessive compulsive behavior, a penchant for neat pinstripe suits even in the dirtiest situations and whose work on fields and tensors was well known among scientists and brought him close to a Nobel prize seven years before. Dyer had suggested him, and he had held out for 1.2 million bucks and a few complicated contractual clauses giving his a percentage of any potential patents. This marked Aziz as the clear capitalist in the lot, but it came about that he was a focused worker when given a clear direction—having no disproportionately obvious faults other than avarice. Bear could never blame him for his love of profit though he could not dearly love him for it either since he always managed to talk about it outside of work. This left the last idea man. Just arrived at a hotel in town the night before was the straggler among the eggheads. Albert Feathersgait was a sixty five year old man who had served on several committees surrounding atomic energy and particle physics as a member of the atomic energy commission. His laboratory experience was limited to a few years during his youth, but he knew more about all general areas of physics than either of the others and brought loads of practical experience in government and committee work. His public persona was that of kindly father, but in private he was a little too bloated with self importance and had an irritating way of phrasing himself in pompous symbols that left Bear a little cold. Bear had no more than a superficial interview with him since he had spent much more time and persuasion trying to hire his first and second choices for the skill set, but at the end of a long search process, numbers one and two on his order of merit list had both said no at the last minute. Bear had then taken Feathersgait, a distant third choice almost as an act of desperation since Q-Kink seriously needed to get to work. Buying eggheads who had both the time and inclination to sequester themselves away from the world working on something they ultimately could not talk about had proven harder than even he had anticipated. Academics and scientists live by publishing—no publishing, no acknowledgement by their peers, no acknowledgement by the public and consequently no fame, no glory, and no hireability in the a drafty halls of academia afterward.
He had told Petrovski and Aziz of the addition of Feathersgait and while the younger man looked suitably blank, his experience in people outside his university being tolerably sparse, Aziz had simply said ‘Ah.” The mono-symbol was sup
erficial enough, conveying a familiarity with Feathergait’s reputation and experience, but it contained a deeper level of meaning that spoke of personal experiences and encounters which were neither impressive nor enjoyable and carried an additional hint of question about the man’s essential abilities. It was a considerable burden for a single ‘ah’, but one it bore easily. Bear nodded his head in recognition if not open agreement, warmed to Aziz a bit more and moved on without regret. There was no perfection in any human equation though there was some method to the madness of this menagerie. Bear’s initial impression was that Feathersgait was at least a man of some parts in the past and had the broad background in physics to apply lessons and understand the practical difficulties of interfacing theory with engineering, the scientific community and the public. Balanced against this was Aziz who had the reputation for discipline to translate whatever ideas they pursued into precise mathematical formulas that then could be handed to Johnson who could develop a practical design from the math with help from Wong, Gaston and the rest and produce a product using the rest of the teams varied practical physical skills to rig up prototypes, examples and test equipment. Of course, that left the keystone on which the whole bridge would be hinged; the decisive man with a brilliant and original idea that would cut the edge of knowledge. The key to the Q-kink success rested this duty on the narrow shoulders of Petrovski. Antonin seemed a mad choice to have rested so much responsibility on; but it was here that Bear’s insight counted and it told him that Antonin, though admittedly young, was exactly young enough that he had few if any preconceived notions and would hopefully become the catalyst for a kind of mental chemistry that resulted in a radical notion. And radical thinking was what was needed if they were to going to accomplish what was needed on the very frontier, the outer limits and terra incognita of the scientific world. In the end, all three eggheads took direction only from the man who hired them. Unlike the Boys and the Wongers, they worked directly for Bear and tended to answer only to him.
