Mind of a Child_ Sentient Serpents Page 4

  “Three, sir. They're running in parallel.”

  “Satisfied, Natty?”

  “I'm satisfied a man with your sense of priorities golfs well under par.”

  Truman resisted the urge to tell him off. Natty had gotten to where he could read his face pretty well. Glancing at his subordinates, Truman said, “He better not be the only one with answers to his own questions when I get back today.”

  The sphincters tightened in the room as Natty watched the sycophantic subordinates squirm some more.

  ***

  Truman paused at the secretary’s station immediately outside his office.

  “How's he holding up?” Secretary Moffit asked. She managed to be Vogue-Cover-Girl pretty and plain and unassuming at the same time. The paradox was what Truman loved most about her.

  “I want him to take a couple weeks, Ms. Moffit.”

  “A couple weeks!”

  “I was in there a good five minutes. He barely had time run down a dozen or so things wrong with my designs.”

  “Oh I see, sir. He really is off his game. You don't think it might be because you designed this one a little bit better?”

  Truman eyed her as if he was wrong about her sanity. “Keep it up, Ms. Moffit, and you'll be going on vacation - permanent vacation.”

  She smiled. “You realize I can't answer for the President and the countless other people he advises?”

  Truman hoped the mask he was currently wearing was sufficient to hide the fact that she had hit a nerve. “They'll have to make do with the other geniuses on the planet, Ms. Moffit. Last I checked, there wasn't one of them worth mentioning not on my payroll.” He absently signed the sheets on the counter placed there for him to add his John Hancock to. “We’ll schedule the vacation towards the end of the month. Give us some time to iron out the kinks on my space hotel.”

  Secretary Moffit sighed. “We'll call in the B-team, sir. I'm sure the planet will be fine without him for two weeks.”

  “Well, I'm not.” He had turned her small mirror towards him to help him adjust his tie. He chose a shirt that morning with a neck measurement a half-size bigger than usual, anticipating the raised blood pressure Natty had a way of bringing on. Apparently he should have gone a size bigger still. “But right now, seems like a minor point. I'll be damned if all of my projects aren’t the envy of the world, least of all, the space hotel. This is a hurdle race, and there are a lot of hurdles left to clear. Besides, he needs more than a refresher to get across that finish line.”

  He headed down the hall towards the elevator, leaving Ms. Moffit to wonder about his last remark.

  At the elevator he pressed the button and glanced back her way. “The team builder set for tomorrow?”

  “Sans Natty, of course.”

  Truman smiled. “Excellent.” The ding of the elevator and the opening of the doors seemed to trumpet his sense of the superb timing of the team builder’s scheduling.

  FOUR

  Three seconds into the push off, Truman jumped into the front seat of the bobsled to work the controls. Leaving Leon to do most of the work with the pushing. That lasted another three seconds before the rules dictated he jump in behind Truman.

  Truman's facade was the image of focused concentration and determination as the bobsled bulleted down the tube of carved ice at ninety miles per hour. He knew because he could feel the cold and the wind determined to erase the mask of tension carved into his face. Most of their success or failure at this point rested on his ability to adjust the front runners as much as three and a half inches to the right or left—the limit of their play—to steer them and to keep the sled from hitting escape velocity and exiting the tube untowardly. Leon’s involvement required an exquisite sensitivity to what Truman was up to vis-à-vis the track and adjusting his body weight accordingly.

  He proved himself quite able with the steering, even as Leon handled the finer points of keeping them from crashing and spinning off course with the subtlest of shifts in his body weight. He had a lot of body weight to shift. That could work for or against them. Asking Leon to finesse that massive body of his was like asking a lion to play with a duck without damaging it. He seemed to be struggling with that contradiction less than Truman was struggling with the rings. Truman gripped the rings used to control the pulley mechanism that adjusted the runners so tightly the ends of his arms no longer felt like hands. They felt like surgically attached rocks.

  Their two-man team endured several close calls. Wobbling and zigzagging dangerously coming out of the latest turn. Every instinct, every muscle twitch working against them. Needing to be compelled to act out of accordance with their own natures. Trying to discipline spinal cord reactions that initiated with no involvement from their brains, no override or kill switch. No sooner did they regain control with an adjustment to the runners, than their speed picked up again to dangerous levels. The cold air continued to have all the sting of a slap to the face. Truman was convinced the reason his head felt swollen was that the blood arriving there was freezing before it could drain. Instead of the numbness he expected to set in by now, his skin felt paradoxically as if it were being held up to a hot iron.

  The course had fifteen turns to navigate, and they were heading into the worst of them now, the Peterson curve, with a 180 degree turn and a 270 degree bank angle. Before he was out of it they’d be subject to as much as 5 g.

  Time stood still as they entered the curve. He realized he was no longer breathing. And he could barely move his hands. The muscles were clamping up as much from the lactic acid build up as the cold. Suck it up, Truman!

  They shot through the curve with a gasp on Truman’s part. Leon’s even breathing behind him hadn’t wavered.

  Ahead next was the labyrinth, with no less than three turns in a row.

  The course length was little over a mile. But with no more than a minute and a half separating the individual cars coming down the pike, the workmen on the sidelines would be giving NASCAR pit crews a run for their money clearing the track in case of a wipe out, with thirty seconds to get in and a minute or so to get out. This wasn’t exactly a by-the-book event, which would have required one car finish the course before another one started. Where was the fun in that?

  ***

  The flag man on the hill, flanked by his assistant, eyed Truman’s progress through his binoculars. “Freaking lunatic! Slow your ass down or I'll be mopping up the pieces.” At seventy-five, he was too old for this grandstanding shit. The younger ones in the track maintenance crew, like the kid beside him, could blame the pruning in their hands to prolonged exposure to cold and wet; he couldn’t. Ten years working on the reflective light panel of white snow banks made anyone look twenty years older than they were. And working every joint at these temperatures meant the bones and ligaments felt the extra miles as well. So imagine how he looked and felt. Truman had a way of squeezing the life out of him better than the sun and cold.

  Truman's face lit up with sheer delight in the lenses of the binoculars the more over the edge things get on the course.

  Flag Man watched a pair of Truman's execs wipe out ahead of him on the latest turn. One of them he recognized as Mr. Klepsky. He was the one with the head too big for his shoulders, like one of those actors who went out of fashion with wide screen TVs because it was easier to detect how weird they looked as opposed to how handsome. The car shot up out of the tube like a missile and blasted headlong into the unmoving face of a boulder. The bobsled literally exploded, the shrapnel overtaking the flecks of snow headed the opposite direction. As for the bobsled sportsmen, for the most part, they were no longer any more than modern art splashed against the rock in red, white, and purple. The white issuing from the pulverized and partly powdered bones, not the snow. The purple coming from the hanging scarves that had formerly been wrapped around their necks, glued to the rocks by the flash-frozen splotches of blood.

  He observed his own people clear the track from the blowback of the explosion to avoid a pile up
with the trailing cars in the nick of time. Pulling out a leg, an intact, if severed head, some brain matter from the number two man whose skull had cracked like an egg from a chicken with insufficient calcium in its diet. Any other body parts to survive the collision not on the track would be chased down after the race. Every drop of blood mopped up. To avoid attracting wolves. Though, no doubt, Truman would pay extra for their presence, as it just upped the stakes further.

  Flag Man kept a lid on his emotions. This wasn’t his first rodeo with the madman Truman.

  By rights, each team of bobsledders should have completed the course before the next team was allowed down the tube. He and Truman had argued emphatically over this point. Truman’s idea of a team builder relied on a greater sense of trust and teamwork than that. To Flag Man’s distinct discomfiture.

  The next mishap was only slightly less dramatic.

  The car overturned in the tube, heads skidded on the ice until bodies were yanked from the cars, and ultimately torn even from their clothing. Their faces and chest skin peeled off of them by the insufficiently polished texture of the frozen water. Flag Man recognized Bransen as one of the two men. The guy with the very broad shoulders but the very narrow outlook on life. The broad shoulders just gave him that much more surface area to appreciate the punishment friction alone could dish out. A shorter distance down the tube and their vestments might have held up well enough before being ripped right off the riders.

  The trailing car, trying to avoid the accident victims by directing themselves up the walls of the tube, ended up slicing off an arm of one victim, and impacting the other guy who was standing up at the time and staggering. The collision hurtled the standing man like a bullet against the opposite wall of the tube. The Flag Man could hear his spine crinkling like tin foil even from where he was standing. Another check of the binoculars confirmed Tin Foil was Bransen. The reality would have been much worse for Bransen than it sounded, the winds carrying much of the sound of cracking bones the other direction from where Flag Man was perched.

  Once again Flag Man’s people didn’t miss a beat carrying out their danger minimization protocols. Whisking the bodies out of the path of the bobsleds still coming down the pike, the rescue team and the bobsledders both a hair’s breadth from further calamity. If Flag Man hadn’t acted preemptively to station people all along the track, they wouldn’t have the time they needed to get in and out quickly. As it was, he should have made the gauntlet even more impenetrable. Though that would probably have meant lining his people up like ducks in a shooting gallery for the bulleting bobsleds rifling off the track.

  The medevac helicopters were already firing up to fly away the broken, mangled bodies of the latest wipe-out duo. Even though the patients were still being placed onto gurneys and attended to where they were so they might live long enough to reach the helicopter. Seconds later, one of the onsite paramedics gestured to pick up the gurneys; the medics would continue their triage work en route to the helicopter, and no doubt, en route to the hospital.

  Flag Man returned his eyes to Truman's two-person team. “He's not going to make it. I told him this course doesn't suffer amateurs lightly. The damn pros die out here in record numbers each year!”

  Flag Man watched as another duo trailing Truman wiped out behind him. They sailed off the course and crashed against the trees. Their landing buffered by the pines’ branches, heavy with snow. One survivor was coughing out the snow he’d swallowed, the other was gasping violently, trying to get air into his lungs that had been knocked out of him. As he fought to get his breathing under control he wiped his forehead of sweat. Flag Man could see it was Travelli. The man sweated grease, even in subzero temperatures. From the look on his face, Flag Man guessed Travelli was composing his letter of resignation in his head rather than face another year on the slopes. Both men were staggering away from the point of impact, but otherwise looked to be okay.

  Flag Man just groaned and shook his head.

  His apprentice, a much younger man in his early twenties, still in training, standing beside him said, “How could you allow this?” His Italian accent was as thick as the shock of black hair on his head. “They can turn around and sue our asses!”

  “Truman put up forty of the eighty-three million it took to build the course.” Prying his eyes away from the binoculars to regard his assistant, he added, “And he pays all of the one-point-five million a year to maintain it.” Returning his attention to the track, he said, “He's not going to sue us.” He hoisted the binoculars to his eyes once more. “He's going to fire us for not making it more challenging. Thank God the stupid son of a bitch'll likely die half way down.”

  He watched Truman getting closer and closer to the finish line to his chagrin.

  Finally, Truman survived the latest near wipe out and, much to Flag Man's dismay, crossed the finish line. Flag Man sighed. “Sharpen our résumés, Butch. It was getting too damn cold up here for me anyway. My old bones can’t take it anymore.” He handed him the binoculars rather unceremoniously.

  ***

  Further down the hill, just past the chute’s finish line, Leon braked to bring them to a stop. He got up and assisted Truman out of the bobsled.

  Truman rubbed his back on standing. Cracked it by twisting it this way and that. “That's another half a mill on back surgery.”

  “Maybe it's time you admitted you're getting older.”

  Truman snorted. “People like me don't face reality, Leon. We bend it to our will.” Ambling on in pain, he said, “Walk with me.”

  Leon hiked with him, keeping him from sliding on his ass whenever Truman looked like he was going to fall from the hard ice packs. And helping him dig out from the soft snow when he sank in a good two feet or so.

  “You're going to take my boy on a little scouting trip,” Truman said. “Nothing too vigorous. He's a bit of a lightweight. The Amazon rainforest, maybe.”

  “The Amazon?! That's not exactly what I'd call lightweight.”

  “I didn't say baby him! He's got to grow up sometime.”

  Stopping and putting his hand on Leon, Truman, at 6’ 7”, towered over him, a point which he used to buffet his rhetoric. “I want you to make him feel like one of the boys, hear me? He's never had a damn friend in his life, and I want him convinced you wouldn't think of going anywhere without him.”

  Leon snorted. “We're not an acting troupe, Truman. We keep people alive. That's all we do. We're not Renaissance men like yourself.”

  Truman exclaimed, “Damn it, Leon! Do you know how many of your fancy tech toys got birthed up in his head? You wouldn't have any fun if it weren't for him. Time you returned the favor.”

  “Look...”

  “Debate over. If he comes back feeling left out and like some alien leper from Mars like he's felt all his life, trust me, you and the rest of your Special Ops people won't be able to find bodyguard work for rich old ladies on 5th Avenue.”

  Truman relaxed a stitch, embraced Leon by the shoulder, and walked with him. “Hell, he's no people person. A half-way convincing acting job is plenty good enough.”

  “You realize we deploy for the Mideast tomorrow?”

  Truman waved him off. “Just so you’re back by the end of the month, I don’t care how many wars you fight in between now and then.”

  Leon clamped down on his jaw until he thought it would break. “Why all the sudden interest in his coming of age?”

  Truman clenched, his vague, impassive expression just readable enough to suggest he was deliberating whether to come clean. He stopped in his tracks once again. “You know why I tested myself today on this track?” He turned to Leon and disabled him with stabbing motions of his fingers to Leon's pressure points. Leon buckled to his knees, wincing in pain. “You don't get to play global domination games by letting yourself get soft.”

  Truman eyed the last of his execs, the ones that had taken the final run down the concourse after him, being loaded up in a military-grade chopper that could carry a cou
ple dozen easy, and flown off to mend. This despite the fact that the half-hearted bobsledders had had their hands on the brakes all the way down; it wasn’t like they had to worry about blocking Truman’s path. He grimaced with disgust. “The reason I need Natty to grow up is, boys with toys sooner or later lose sight of the real objective, which isn't to have fun.”

  He assisted Leon up.

  Leon used those hawk eyes of his to peer into Truman's soul. “He's not willing to make your more lethal planet killers for you any more, is he?”

  “But he will when we're through with him. He'll gain a genuine appreciation for what the real stakes are out in the field.” He dusted Leon off.

  “How? By playing soldier with me and my people?”

  “For starters.” He straightened Leon's collar. “Let's just say I devised a few things to help keep your boys sharp as well.”

  Truman walked on, leaving Leon slack-jawed. “Don't thank me,” Truman said, raising his voice without looking back. “It's on the house.”

  FIVE

  PRESENT TIME

  At the former Air Force base, the military hardware and soldiers adorning the Tarmac was impressive—even if Natty were planning to take over a small country. But after Truman’s comments, Leon wasn’t taking any chances.

  Various combat-ready vehicles were on-boarded onto four C-5 Galaxy heavy logistics transport planes. He could recite the call letters or acronyms of each armament carrier being onboarded by heart—if they had any. All prototypes. And the geeks that created them on ALPHA UNIT, well, they favored nicknames over acronyms. Like “the peacemaker” or “devil’s delight.” If the prototypes survived field testing, you could bet that Leon would pin down their designations a bit more specifically than that.

  Some vehicles were of the engineering variety. They might well need to make roads where they wanted to go.