IV - The Solution

The President of the United States shook his head. It had been twelve hours since the red phone rang and they were no closer to finding a solution, and twelve hours closer to mass destruction. Assembled in front of him were his five most trusted advisers, his five best friends from college, "The Five Musketeers": Dougie, Moose, Whit, K-Rock and Brownie, or as they were known professionally, the Secretary of State, Secretary of the Interior, Secretary of Homeland Security, Secretary of the Treasury, and Secretary of Defense. They stood in a semicircle, in size order, as was the President's preference.

"It's the Russians. Those damn Russians. The Russians and the Ukbeks" Dougie said.

"It's the Russians, the Uzbeks, the Chinese, the Japanese, the South Koreans, the North Malaysians... even the fucking Laotians. All of APAC. And without warning" said Whit.

"Don't forget the Vietnamese" Brownie chimed in.

"Fuck the Vietnamese. Fuck Sri Lanka and fuck Cambodia" Whit retorted.

"You and Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is mousetits in all of this. We all know that the root of this is in Moscow, in St. Petersburg. That man you propped up, that festering sore of a man, that Kuleshov" Dougie responded.

"Fuck you, you peg-legged faggot."

"I lost this leg in the war. The Nine Day War. Where were you? At your daddy's house on Martha's Vineyard, tending to the horses?"

"You're one to speak. Your family is the richest asshole family of them all. And you're a damn faggot."

"Cool it, fellas" said The President. He had had enough. The tension in the room was palpable. He inhaled, took a sip of his Diet Pepsicoke and let out a sigh. Was this how it was for all the presidents before him? Was this what it was like for Kennedy during the Bay of Pigs? For Romney on that dreadful day, November Ninth?

"What I don't understand is, why didn't we have a handle on any of this? How can a dozen, fifteen, twenty countries do this without so much as a peep on the intelligence wires? I call my man at NSA, he's dumbshitted. CIA, FBI -- nothing. Ambassadors, operatives, embassy stooges -- no one knows anything. No one knows anything until it's too late, until the damn Batphone is ringing. And you know what I did? I called my cousin. My second cousin, the importer-exporter over in Hong Kong. I tell him what we're hearing, and he says 'You know, now that you mention it, there's been a lot of tanker ships coming in and out of Victoria Harbor the last couple weeks'. I had to humiliate myself, go out on national television and tell the taxpayers that we can't go through with the tax cuts, the tax cuts I promised, that I ran on... I took a blood oath for those tax cuts, and there I am, humiliated out there on the podium. Meanwhile we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars -- trillions of dollars -- so that the intelligence agencies can mull around playing Pong."

"Pong, sir?" K-Rock was confused.

"It was a game. One of the first video games. Like ping pong, but there were only two lines for paddles and a dot for a ball."

"Kind of like Blasto-tennis?"

"Yes, exactly." The President leaned back in his chair. "So what are we looking at if this all goes through?"

Brownie slapped a report down on the President's desk. "Sattelites show missiles. Nuclear missiles. Large quantities of plutonium -- enough for seventeen dirty bombs. And botulism. An assload of botulism. A fleet of helicopters to drop it all on innocent civilians."

K-Rock chimed in. "Passenger airplanes used as weapons, sir. Loaded up with dynamite in the cargo holds, to be flown into our airspace as commercial jets and then smashed into nuclear power plants. Three different models of jets, all controlled by a central computer in Guangzhou."

"The goat city" The President said. "Anything else?"

"Paratroopers," said Whit. "Over four thousand paratroopers trained in martial arts, coming over by barge, disguised as rolls of fiberglass insulation, and worse," he sighed, "they're going to drop them off at the top of Mount McKinley. If they get to the bottom of that mountain, the entire Alaskan peninsula belongs to the Russians. They'll send battalions down through Canada and take the Pacific Northwest in a heartbeat."

"If there's even a Pacific Northwest to speak of," interjected Moose. "I have on good word that there's already a five-thousand megawatt nuclear bomb planted somewhere in the subway system in Seattle. The bomb will be set off by a collision with the five-thirty A.M. Northgate-bound train this Friday morning. Even worse -- if the train is impeded electronically, the bomb is set to blow. Someone would have to go in and slow the train down manually -- literally stop it dead with his bare hands."

"And as if that weren't enough," said Dougie, "all of the codes necessary to decode APAC's plans are stored on eleven different computers, in eleven different languages. And the master code is only known to Irina Kuleshov, the Russian President's wife. Her allegiance to him is unwavering. The only way to get the master code out of her would be..." Dougie started to laugh, "would be... well... to seduce her. And you all know... you all know how cold she is. That might be the most impossible task of all."

The President paused for a moment to gather this all in. "So basically we need someone who is impervious to radiation, can deactivate a nuclear bomb, defeat thousands of armed soldiers in hand-to-hand combat, fly three different types of planes and a helicopter, climb one of the tallest mountains in the world, seduce the most sexually repressed women to ever walk the earth, halt a subway car with his bare hands and hack into the computer networks of eleven separate governments, all in the next thirty-six hours." The President cracked his knuckles. "Who on Earth could possibly do all of that? Who?"

"Well there is... was..."

They looked at each other knowingly.

"It's not possible. It's not."

"He's dead. Long dead. Burnt to a crisp in that explosion in Glasnovorst."

"It was Belgrade, and yes. Burnt to a crisp. Blacker than your wife, right Moose?"

"Cocksucker."

"I heard he was working for the Russians. In the Ukraine, someplace. It sounds like 'carkey'. Carkeyev?"

"Kharkiv?"

"Yes, that's it"

"Not plausible."

"I agree. Impossible. He was as loyal an American as there ever was."

K-Rock stuffed his hands into his pockets. "He's been reported dead before. We've been wrong before"

"Yes, but this time there was evidence. DNA evidence. RNA evidence. I personally examined the body. It was him, no doubt, burnt to a crisp. But there it was, that damned tattoo, same as always" said Moose.

"His first wife hated it."

"We all hated it."

They stood there, defeated. If only he were alive. If only. But that was but a pipe dream. He was gone now, actually gone. Moose had inspected the body.

They stood there for a while, silent, remembering the man who had saved them who had saved their hides, no, the entire country's hide, more times than they could remember. The President spoke: "Let's say he is out there. How would we find him?"

"That's the thing. We wouldn't even know where to begin."

"He could be anywhere on the planet, in any country. He might not even look like himself. Hell, he could be black for all we know."

"Hispanic."

"An Eskimo... Inuit, sorry."

"Yes," the President said, "but if you had to pick one place, one place on Earth where he'd most likely be...."

"Well, he does have his vices, like any man" Dougie said.

"Did have his vices" corrected Whit.

"And there was one thing we all know he could never resist..."