Nobody’s Heroes 1

In the immortal words of Monty Python, “And now, for something completely different.”

Some years ago I decided to write a novel in a month for some challenge or the other. I’m going to post it in sections here; should you find the writing terrible that’s okay, I’m not a professional writer and my ego isn’t (too) caught up in this. Of course if you like it, that’s even better. Either way, feel free to leave a comment for or against this sort of literary endeavor. All characters are of course fictional, and none of the events really took place. The year that none of this happened was 2007, which should give a handy reference for some of the activities described.

Nobody’s Heroes

A Novel

Prologue

So here I am, shaking like the last leaf on the tree in a cold December wind, clutching a .45 and wondering just how I will die. My friends overcame the failures they had to endure, and now I’ve done the worst thing possible. I’ve failed them. At least one is already dead; I don’t know how many others are still alive. The only reason I know any of them are still alive is because I can still hear the chatter of gunfire in the cavernous cargo holds around me. Soon it will all be over, and in all likelihood we’ll all be dead, and I can’t believe how badly I let them down. If we fail in our mission, which looks more and more likely by the moment, enough people will die to wipe the memory of 9/11 out of the nation’s collective consciousness forever, and if we succeed the best I can hope for is that we all go to prison for the rest of our lives. So somehow I’ve got to steady my hands and step through that door and kill as many of the suicidal zealots who are intent on destroying my country as I can. I know that I’m not up to the task, that I’m not good enough, but there’s no one else to do it now, and I can only hope and pray I find a few of my friends still alive when I get there.

Chapter One

How Things Got Started

When I was a kid, I loved comic books. That does not, of course, make me at all special or unusual for an American male. Quite frankly, I am not really special or unusual in any meaningful way. Although the story I have to tell is about heroes, I myself have no super powers. What I do have is an active imagination, several co-workers who have become close friends and who do possess many unusual abilities, and by a complete accident of bureaucratic mismanagement, access to large sums of money. But what I’ve come to understand is that there is something more valuable than my friends’ abilities or my access to money. That something is the value of failure. Because six people who were by all accounts failures in their chosen pursuits in life taught me something I once knew as a kid, but had forgotten somewhere along the way. Heroes are often, maybe even always, seen as failures by most people, until the time comes when they actually do what no one else thought possible. Heroes are heroes because they take the failures that break most other people and surmount them.

That, of course, brings me to the situation we’ve found ourselves in, an intelligence operation on the verge of becoming a major international disaster. Normally, when you hear about an intelligence operation, it means something has gone wrong. The best intelligence operations are never in the news. The 9/11 attacks were all over the news because various intelligence agencies got caught with their pants down for a variety of reasons. Actually, that’s not entirely true. The main reason they got caught with their pants down is because the people in charge of the executive branch through most of the nineties did not trust government intelligence agencies, and so treated them like a bunch of red-headed step children. Janet Reno’s infamous “wall of separation” which prohibited intelligence agencies within the same branch of the same government from sharing information is one of the main reasons the 9/11 hijackers were successful. But that, of course, is hindsight, and in all fairness the history of government intelligence agencies is riddled with examples of reasons they could be regarded as untrustworthy.

So yes, eventually this story will be about a team of heroes. Just give me a little time to explain how they came to be heroes, and how I came to be the leader and mastermind of their team, despite my rather pronounced lack of any extraordinary abilities. It all started in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when President Bush and congress created the Department of Homeland Security. I have worked for years under the Under Secretary for Science and Technology. Unlike many of my former superiors, I do have an actual college degree from a real university. In point of fact I have a B.S. in “poultry science” (chicken farming) from Texas A&M. Mostly I went to Texas A&M for the parties, and wound up majoring in chicken farming purely by accident. (I actually meant to sign up for political science, but once I was already in class I decided it was easier staying put than trying to change all the paperwork). Having earned a degree in chicken farming, but having no desire to actually run a chicken farm (if you’ve ever smelled one you don’t have to ask why) I did the natural thing and went to work for the government, mostly in telling chicken farmers who actually ran chicken farms what to do. After a while I discovered I had a talent for grant writing, which is the government term for a professional beggar.

Now if you want to get ahead in government jobs, the most important thing you have to do is bring more money into your department. Few things are more valuable at bringing in money than a good grants writer, so I found that my skills were actually in high demand. Since my degree was, technically, in the field of science I ended up working in the Science and Technology office, which was folded into the Department of Homeland Security. After the foul ups of the way Katrina was handled several of the department’s directorates were audited, and to say the Senate didn’t care for the way Science and Technology was being run was an understatement. People were losing their jobs all around me, and while I seemed to be permanently stalled at my GS-12, I definitely didn’t want to lose my federal pension. That’s when my idea came to me.

Another directorate within homeland security is the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. Ever since CSI and its various spin offs and knock offs hit it big on television, everybody in law enforcement wants to be a scientist. So I took my science degree and grant writing skills and made a proposal to a supervisor in the law enforcement training group.

I proposed a program “To co-ordinate, in as efficient a manner as reasonably possible, while in keeping with all relevant federal, state and local laws, ordinances, mandates and policies, the creation of a group of cross-trained professionals who will endeavor to negate imminent hostilities against the United States, by means voluntary or involuntary, in keeping with all appropriate judicial decisions regarding the gathering and usage of intelligence relating to organizations who may be reasonably suspected of constituting an imminent threat to domestic national security.” The supervisor in question virtually swooned at my gobbledygook, envisioning the dollars that would roll in thanks to his new scientific grant writer, while I happily considered the fact that my mandate was so ridiculously broad as to allow me to do whatever I wanted, which in all honesty was as little as possible. I do, after all, work in Washington, D.C.

What happened next was both good and bad. My grant proposal was a modest success. It brought in enough money to fund research and the development of a group, but was small enough that my current supervisor had bigger fish to fry. All of which meant he left me in charge of the project and the money. Now you have to understand, the first rule of money in any government bureaucracy is that you absolutely, positively must spend every last cent you receive, and then complain that you still do not have enough. If you do not spend your money then you will not get it again in the next budget. If, on the other had, you treat frugality as if it were a cockroach and spend every last cent allotted to your office then you will receive even more money in the next budget. So all I had to do was spend money like a drunken sailor and I could sail through to retirement.

ON TO CHAPTER 2 HERE…. https://okrahead.wordpress.com/2023/01/25/nobodys-heroes-2/

Atlanta ain’t Portland… https://theothermccain.com/2023/01/23/the-atlanta-riot-out-of-state-anarchists-torch-police-vehicle/

Meth heads all around…. https://whoresandale.wordpress.com/2023/01/23/the-other-meth/

Let’s you and him fight…. https://spawnyspace.wordpress.com/2023/01/22/young-men-playing-you-off/

Didn’t even have four wheel drive…. https://sylg1.wordpress.com/2023/01/23/pass-the-old-el-paso-2/

Maintain your frame…. https://sigmaframe.wordpress.com/2023/01/23/smp-paradigms-compared/

Keep praying…. https://nuncamedesesperare.wordpress.com/2023/01/14/brief-hopefully-hiatus/

This does make some sense…. https://deepstrength.wordpress.com/2023/01/23/men-supposedly-dropping-from-the-labor-force-because-of-social-status/

Gas stoves are racist…. https://gunnerq2.com/identity-politics-and-your-gas-stove/

This has to end…. https://winteryknight.com/2023/01/23/secular-left-morality-a-closer-look-at-what-two-g4y-activists-did-to-the-boys-they-adopted/

Remember this…. https://proof-proofpositive.blogspot.com/2023/01/quote-du-jour_0674098749.html

It isn’t in the eye of the beholder… https://www.scifiwright.com/2023/01/against-the-mountains-of-madness-ep-08-what-is-beauty/