Don’t want no F-86
Make a dive, you’re in a fix
And if you try to turn around
You’ll be six feet underground
Tah, rah, rah, BOOM de ay!
Will you go BOOM today?
Three went BOOM yesterday!
Tah, rah, rah, BOOM de ay!
– WW II Army Air Force Drinking Song
This morning, about eight o’clock, I got a call from Maia, Cerise’s younger sister. As regular readers of this Web log know, Cerise is my current Significant Other. Maia works for the Secret Service; she requested a meeting with me at noon in a secluded part of Rock Creek Park. Well, Momma didn’t raise no fools, so I immediately contacted Cerise and invited her to attend, too. They were both there when I arrived, about five minutes post meridian, sitting at a picnic table in a gazebo. After a few silent nods of recognition, the three of us walked off down a trail into the woods.
“What’s this all about, Maia?” I watched for her reaction when I asked that question – she broke out in tears – not such a good sign.
“That bomb yesterday,” Maia finally managed.
Cerise was clearly skeptical. “You mean that business with the sniffer doggie and the Israeli delegation minivan down at the White House?”
Maia nodded affirmation, wiping away more tears. “I called in sick today because I need to talk to somebody who knows what the hell is going on around here before I go back to work downtown again.”
“But that whole thing was a dud run, wasn’t it?” Cerise demanded, eyeing her kid sister with that disdain only an older sibling can muster, “Sniffer doggie alerted on the driver’s luggage, everybody freaked out, the press center across the street from the White House was evacuated, bomb squad called, the whole nine yards – and it turned out that the doggie just had to pee, right?”
Maia started shaking. “That’s what was reported,” she stopped, confronting Cerise “Of course! Because that’s what we told them! Why do you think we cleared out the press center?”
“You mean,” I speculated, “the press center evacuation was called in order to avoid having the members of the press observe something – different from the official story we all heard last night?”
“Way different!” Maia shot back pointedly. “That mutt alerted on a suitcase nuke!”
“In the Israeli delegation’s luggage?” Cerise was incredulous, looking her sister over suspiciously. “Have you been taking X or something when you go out to those dance clubs in Southwest?”
“I’m not paranoid!” Maia declared stubbornly, glaring at Cerise. “And you know as well as I do that everybody in the Secret Service gets urine tested – unannounced and completely by surprise – at least twice a year. They’ve even started taking hair samples!”
“Looks like they want to make real sure nobody close to the president has any drugs,” I mused, “lest he start asking around for them and get his hands on some. I’m sure that wouldn’t go down well with the his handlers.”
“Look,” Maia continued, “I don’t care if George Bush smokes crack, snorts cheese and chugs a Wild Irish Rose forty on the White House stoop, okay? I mean, what could it do – give him such severe and irreparable brain damage that he can’t pronounce words beyond a sixth-grade vocabulary or speak a coherent English sentence? Who would notice? Look, I’m telling you – that was a suitcase nuke in Olmert’s baggage train yesterday afternoon!”
“Wait a minute now,” Cerise interjected, “listen to what you’re saying! If it’s possible for the terrorists to sneak an armed suitcase nuke into a minivan transporting the Israeli…”
“It wasn’t armed!” Maia shouted, then peered nervously into the surrounding woods, obviously fearing that she had been overheard.
“Not… armed?” Cerise cocked her head to the side, rather like a puzzled puppy. It’s not often that she’s at a loss for words, but it was clear that Cerise couldn’t think of anything to say in reply to that.
“Ah, an unarmed suitcase nuke in the Israeli delegation’s baggage,” I said, taking up the thread of conversation where Cerise had so obviously dropped it, “that would have, shall we say, possibly highly significant implications…”
“Oh, yeah,” Maia agreed, “and the Sears Tower – that there is possibly a really tall building. Tom, you’re the only person I can think of who could make sense of something like that. Just work with me here for a minute, all right? I happen to know that the mutt’s nose knew the score yesterday afternoon and it detected the explosives in a gun detonator type uranium 235 suitcase nuke, yield about fifteen kilotons. The device was capable of being set to explode in response to a signal from a timer, and there was a timer in the suitcase, attached to the device. But the device wasn’t armed and the timer wasn’t set. It’s almost like whoever put it in the minivan was going to come back later and set it up to blow at a specific time – a time they didn’t know at the moment, maybe…”
“Or,” I offered, “a time that they did know, but one that would exceed the capacity of the timer. Or a time that whoever placed the device could not, under any circumstances, risk being revealed if the device were discovered…”
“So you’re saying,” Cerise joined in, “that… oh no, that’s absurd! Besides, the Israelis can build a multi-megaton implosion lens thermonuclear suitcase bomb. Why would they bother with a rinky-dink U-235 gun detonator bomb?”
“Because,” Maia replied triumphantly, “they know that Al Qaeda could never build anything with a yield over about 25 kilotons!”
“And therefore,” I concluded, “it would look like Al Qaeda or somebody similar was responsible?”
“So,” Cerise concluded, ”Olmert’s crew would set it to go off after they left Washington and then depend on how the results looked to get the United States to go berserk on Islamist radicals?”
“More like berserk on anybody facing Mecca, anywhere,” I opined. “Something like that would result in a nuclear holocaust directed against the entire Moslem world. No city or town with a population of more than 1,000 in any predominantly Islamic country would escape complete, utter, glow-in-the-dark nuclear annihilation.”
“Are you saying,” Cerise objected, “that there would be nothing that the Europeans, the Russians or the Chinese could do to stop us from toasting every single Moslem population center on the planet?”
“Well,” I replied, “it’s dollars to doughnuts we’d just tell anybody in Europe who called us on it to go Cheney themselves. And the Russians, I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that they wouldn’t exactly mind having somebody else get rid of Islam as a major influence in world history and politics. But the Chinese, I’m absolutely sure, would be delighted to have us take care of it for them. Hell, once we got the ball rolling, who knows? Maybe the Russians and the Chinese would lob a few of their own MIRVs at places like Chechnya and Xinjiang.”
“You’re both being ridiculously cynical,” Cerise observed, “that kind of analysis presumes that the United States’ allies can effectively play us for patsies, lead us around like a trained 800 pound gorilla on a chain that they can sic on anyone who incurs their disapproval, get us to do their dirty work for them, sacrifice our lives in their interest regardless of whether it serves our interests or not, and pay for the whole thing, to boot!”
Maia and I stared at Cerise during what proved to be a protracted and pregnant pause.
“And which part of that,” Maia inquired, “is it that Israel has not already done to the United States?”
“Damn it, you two!” Cerise boiled over, “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East!”
“Not anymore,” Maia replied, “the Palestinian Authority had democratic elections – the only problem was, the Israelis didn’t like who won! Israel and the United States are only in favor of democracy when the winners are people they approve of!”
“All, right, but what about the fact that Israel was a strategic bulwark against Soviet expansion in the Middle East?” Cerise insisted.
“But there’s no more Soviet Union, dear,” I reminded her.
“Okay, then the Jewish people deserve a homeland because of what happened to them during World War II,” Cerise asserted confidently.
“Maybe so,” Maia volleyed back, “but why did it have to be right in the middle of Palestine?”
“Because that’s where the land God gave them happens to be!” Cerise insisted.
“You can’t go around founding nation states based on questionable theological mythology, Cerise,” Maia reminded her obviously more idealistic sister.
“Tell that to the Iranians!” Cerise suggested sarcastically, “and while you’re at it, tell that to Osama bin Laden, too!”
“So you despise the Iranians and the Wahhabi radicals for basing their actions on absurd religious ideas,” Maia debated, “but you think the concept of God giving Canaan to Moses is just fine and dandy – makes perfect sense, something a rational person could consider as an acceptable basis for creating millions of Arab refugees and getting one third of the world so angry at the United States of America they want to murder us all?”
“Now wait a minute,” Cerise insisted, “the radical Moslems want to murder us all because we have democracy. They want to murder us all because we have troops in Saudi Arabia. They want to murder us all because we allow women to vote, drive cars and work for a living on their own. They want to murder us all because Christians have controlled Andalusia since King Philip of Spain took it from the Caliphate in 1492. They want to murder us all because we represent modernity, progress and material wealth – all of which diminish the power of bloodthirsty, deranged demagogues like them. They wanted to murder us all because we didn’t hand Salman Rushdie over to Islamic justice for execution after he wrote ‘Satanic Verses,’ and now they want to murder us all because the Queen is going to give Rushdie a knighthood! And most of all, they want to murder us all because we won’t convert to Islam and let morons who know how to do nothing but chant the Koran all day run our society, our courts, our economy and our lives! Do you realize that the latest fatwa from Egypt on women in the workplace says that in order to be allowed to sit in the same room in the company of male coworkers with the door closed, a woman must effectively render the male coworkers ‘relatives’ – by breast feeding them! Those insane mullahs even have footnotes arguing against breast pumps, drinking cups or anything symbolic. Oh, no, it’s got to be the real thing to please their concept of religious piety!”
“Utter barbarity!” I managed to slip in, edgewise, as one often must when the fairer gender holds forth at length on subjects important to them.
“You bet it’s barbaric,” Cerise agreed, “and the Israelis have the right idea about those monsters, too – push them out, get rid of them! They’re incorrigible, primitive tribal savages – just wipe them off the face of the…”
“Cerise, darling,” I interrupted, as politely as possible, “you have worked your way around to a justification for exterminating Moslems; the very proposition which, I believe, you started out arguing against.”
Cerise considered my comment briefly, then shook her head in frustration. “Damn it! That always happens when I start thinking about the Middle East! Start on one side, think about stuff, end up on the other side, think some more, end up where you started. Face it – the Middle East just sucks, totally, their side, our side, my side, your side, anybody’s side – it all just totally sucks out loud in three-dimensional, high-definition, 16 million bit color and Dolby THX theater sound.”
“Well, anyway,” I sighed, “About that suitcase nuke – Cerise, do you recall, counting the one yesterday, how many suitcase nukes the Washington insider grapevine says the feds have intercepted since September, 2001?”
Cerise gazed up in the sky for a moment. “Ah, counting the one yesterday, that would be four… no, five. Plus nine radiological dirty bombs, and six CBW dispersal systems.”
“And it’s always hushed up tighter than Eva Longoria’s thong bikini, isn’t it?” I pointed out.
“Every single time. Always gets explained just like what Maia saw yesterday.”
“And why is that?” I asked, knowing the answer, of course.
“Because every time so far it’s been a complete cliff hanger. They’ve snagged the bombs just hours – in a couple of cases, just minutes – before they were about to go off; and every single one of them was in a federal facility so prominent and/or sensitive that the feds would never dare announcing to the press what had happened. It would simply prove to the enemy how vulnerable our incompetent federal employees have made America.”
“Precisely,” I smiled at Maia, nodding my head in agreement, “Stuff like what you saw yesterday has happened before and it will happen again. Sure, if the FBI, DHS, CIA or any of those clowns could nab a suitcase nuke on its way to the U.S. Capitol – and nab that bomb some obviously safe distance from it – then the Administration would be trumpeting every detail of the plot, the arrest, the investigation – everything! But no way they’re going to do that when the only suitcase nuke targeting the U.S. Capitol they have found so far was located under a desk in the House Chamber with all of eleven minutes available to disarm it.”
Maia stepped back, astonished, surveying Cerise and me. “You mean, you two know that there have been numerous attempts to attack downtown Washington with weapons of mass destruction, and you both still go to work downtown every day? Like nothing’s wrong? Like none of those things ever happened?”
“Sure,” I admonished her, “and that’s exactly what you should do tomorrow after you get over whatever fake malady you claimed to have in order to get off work today. Report back to your job at the White House as if nothing special had happened – because, as you now know, nothing special did happen, after all.”
“But…” Maia searched for the correct words. “All I have to do… All either of you have to do – is work someplace besides downtown DC, right?”
“Very perceptive,” I congratulated Maia, “Since the worst case scenario is a 25 kiloton nuke detonated on the Mall, you could work at a federal facility in Gaithersburg Maryland or Reston, Virginia, and the worst that would happen would be maybe the windows would blow in on the side of the building facing the blast. Hell, if you worked at a federal facility in Frederick, Maryland, where there are plenty, let me tell you, you’d maybe see a light on the horizon, hear a distant booming sound and see the top of the mushroom cloud rising – that’s it. So, if working for the Secret Service right downtown in the belly of the beast gives you the willies, put in for a transfer to work at one of the outlying federal installations.”
Maia considered my advice briefly. “Yeah,” she averred, “maybe I’ll do that. But how come you two haven’t done it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, putting my arm around Cerise, who, in turn, gave me an affectionate peck on the cheek, “my theory is, the constant threat of death makes our sex life better.”