American Sucker

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Chapter 1

Johnny’s Confession
 

My name is Gordon Danbury. I am a 49-year-old single father of two from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I am a graduate of the University of Iowa and a former US Navy veteran. I was an Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) diver during my time in the Navy. This is when I met Johnny in 1991. Johnny and I worked together in the dive locker at EOD Mobile Unit 9 in Vallejo, California, and participated in Operation Desert Storm when America invaded Kuwait and Iraq. Johnny was a giant of a man standing at 6’5” and 225 lbs. of solid muscle. He was a good-looking guy of Italian and Puerto Rican descent with a thick Brooklyn accent and an ego that could fill a room. He was incredibly strong and not someone you would want to let get a hold of you with his bare hands. He also had a big heart and a great sense of humor. However, Johnny was also a slow-moving target for jokes and wisecracks in the dive locker. Being faster on my feet and better skilled at verbal judo than Johnny, I got in some good comedic insults from time to time but knew if he took one step near me, I had to run.
 

One of my greatest memories with Johnny was taking a college public speaking class on base. For a huge and handsome guy, Johnny had the public speaking confidence of a thirteen-year-old girl. Our class project for a grade was to make a five-minute speech in front of the class and answer some questions at the end of the speech. Johnny’s topic of all things was scuba diving. This should have been like finger paints, and he only chose this subject so it would be easy for him in the first place. Wrong. I pounced on him. The teacher let it go because she knew we were both special forces guys and friends. She also knew it was good for Johnny to learn to overcome nervousness in front of people. If he could master speaking in front of a clown like me in the audience trying to sabotage him after every sentence, he could come become a politician. I can honestly say I was one of the few people who Johnny allowed to tease him because it was all in good fun, and he spared me no quarter either. The retribution for the public speaking class happened in a bar in downtown San Francisco. A few of us guys went downtown looking for beers and girls when we stumbled into the Golden Gate Bar and Grill. It was a popular place, and the women were beautiful. I was making good conversation with a girl that was absolutely gorgeous. She asked me what I did, and I tried to act my coolest and replied, “Well, I don’t like to tell a lot of people this, but I am an explosives expert and a diver in the Navy.” She laughed and asked, “Are you here with the big guy behind you that was the first guy to parachute into Iraq?” I turned my head, and there was Johnny’s big gorilla head just rolling with laughter at a table behind me.
 

My uneventful participation in the war amounted to being stationed on the USS Mt. Hood (AE-29) with three other EOD personnel in the Persian Gulf, transferring bombs and ammunition among other US Navy ships participating in the battle. We were there as a safety precaution in the event a bomb was accidentally dropped on the deck during handling or the ship sailed into a minefield. Neither of these events occurred, and I should have received a medal for enduring boredom. Johnny, on the other hand, was forward deployed to operate with a West Coast SEAL team that was taking out government facilities and tracking down, capturing, and killing members of the Iraqi military. The commando unit captured and killed several Iraqis in the first few days and weeks of the operation before it became a refugee crisis with tens of thousands of Iraqis surrendering in the end. The Iraqi fighters were a collection of illiterate farmers, old men, teenagers, and storekeepers who had been conscripted to fight under Saddam Hussein. In the end, Johnny was awarded several commendation medals for his participation in the events.
 

After the war, I elected to get out of the Navy and return to Iowa to go to college. I majored in political science at the University of Iowa and graduated in 1995. Johnny left EOD after the war, reenlisted, and accepted orders to Basic Underwater Demolition School; SEAL training. Johnny had to be one of the biggest guys to ever finish the training. I found it hard to believe Johnny made it as he was slow on his feet and in the water compared to many of the guys back at EOD Mobile Unit 9. I attended his graduation in Coronado, California, in 1994. Johnny stuck out like a dump truck on a new car lot lined up with the nineteen guys in his class who finished the training out of the initial one hundred and four candidates the day training began. I was proud of him. It was also the last time I saw him for almost thirty years.
 

I took several different writing jobs after college. The pay was usually low, and the creativity level was worse. I settled as a columnist for The Cedar Rapids Tribune because it offered health insurance and a retirement plan. The writing itself might as well have been with crayons. The column was constricted to local news, weather, crime, agriculture, and sports, which did nothing for me. I could write opinions about various subjects in these veins, but all had to be approved by the editor. I met my wife at a part-time telemarketing job I worked at during the nights. She graduated college and wanted to be an elementary education teacher. We got married in 1996, had a couple of kids, bought a home, got divorced 10 years later, and I was stuck in Cedar Rapids while the kids were going to school. I loved the kids and had some good friends in the community, but I was falling further behind financially. It was a depressing and humbling time to say the least.
 

In 2007, I was contacted through social media and invited to an old EOD Mobile Unit 9 reunion with some old friends in Coronado, California. It was to be a golfing fundraiser for wounded vets and a dinner later that night. I knew after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, EOD’s stock rocketed in the eyes of the defense department. The weapon of choice for the Taliban and Al Qaeda were improvised explosive devices. The people that solved these problems were EOD. I was excited to go because I knew many of the people that would be there. In the years since I left, I struggled to find friends of the same caliber. There were indeed good friends in my life, but not a hundred guys that would give their life for me just because their job might require it like back at Mobile Unit 9.
 

From some of their profiles online, I could tell many of the guys were successful, making good money and involved in their communities. In short, I had to put everything on my credit card, and at the reunion, I would be the starving writer from Iowa, and many of my old friends who had stayed in were now senior enlisted personnel, officers, or contractors working overseas. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t ashamed of myself for not being able to keep pace. To the guys at the reunion, they could have cared less. I just wanted to be the one with the great stories, and I was jealous before I even got there.
 

I flew into San Diego, picked up a rental car, and got a room in Ocean Beach away from the tourists. I couldn’t afford to drop a few hundred dollars a night on a room in Coronado; that was the bigger truth. I skipped out on the fundraiser by making up an excuse of seeing a relative so I didn’t have to get sucked into an auction I could not afford to donate to. I drove around San Diego most of the day, seeing the sights. It had been a long time since I had been in San Diego, but it was still amazingly beautiful compared to Cedar Rapids. The sports cars, the women, the palm trees, the beaches, and the entire vibe were electric. It made me want to never go back to Iowa. The reality was it was way too expensive out in San Diego for my budget.
 

I eventually made my way over the Coronado Bridge in the afternoon. I drove down the Silver Strand to Imperial Beach and back. I parked near the Hotel del Coronado and headed out to the beach. I pulled out the bed cover and towels from the hotel I had stuffed in my bag. I stripped down to my shorts and ran into the ocean and dove under the waves. I swam as hard as I could for a minute into the waves and into water deep enough I could not touch. I dove down and in a few strokes I reached the bottom and pulled up some sand in my hand. I missed the ocean. I floated about for a while and then made my way back to my spot on the beach. I laid on the beach for about an hour. The sun felt good on my skin. It was getting later in the afternoon, and I decided to make my way towards McP’s Irish Pub. It had been an old SEAL hangout for decades and a good place for the reunion dinner.
 

I recognized a few of the guys right away at the bar. Messerly, the fastest guy I even knew, was now a big shot real estate guy in northern California. Kehoe was a detective in San Diego and taught martial arts on the side. Draper was now bald but a warrant officer at Mobile Unit 3 in Coronado. Stearns was a command master chief at EOD Training Unit 1 in Coronado. When Johnny walked in, we made eye contact, and a big smile came across his face. I gave him a big hug, and he squeezed me hard just to tease me, letting me know he could still snap my spine with his bare hands if he felt like it. He was heavier now as he filled out. He looked like a lineman in the NFL, but his demeanor was the same. After a few hours of drinking and telling sea stories with the others, I bumped into him in the bathroom of the bar. I asked him what he was doing these days, and he smiled and replied, “Let me get you a drink. We can talk outside.” I thought it an odd response as it was a simple question, but I knew Johnny had seen some things I had not, and I didn’t want to seem like a groupie.
 

I followed him out the back towards the outside bar. He approached the bartender and said, “I will have a pale ale, and Sweet Pants here will have some warm milk.” It was a harmless insult, but this would never fly. It was almost as if I was being challenged by Johnny to come over the top of that insult to my masculinity. Without missing a beat, I replied, “Damn it, Johnny. I told you not to reference your mother as Sweet Pants when we are in public. People start finding out about you sticking your finger in her ass, and they are gonna start talking, big boy.” Johnny grabbed me by the back of the neck with his huge paw and pulled me in towards him while he was laughing. “I love this guy. Get him anything he wants.” Johnny told the bartender as he stood there with his wallet in his hand. “Gordo, you should have been a goddamn comedian.” Johnny said as his eyes quickly scanned the entire bar. The bartender handed us the drinks, and we made our way to a table away from the other fellas.
 

Johnny took a swig of beer and asked, “So what the fuck are you doing these days?”
“I am a writer and telemarketer, pretty much.” I replied.
“Oh yeah, what do you write about?”
“For next to no money, I write for the local newspaper. Basically, it is stupid local bullshit in Iowa; sports, weather, and crime. I also write some fiction and am trying to get an agent to sign me for a few pieces I wrote. Publishing is not a big deal anymore with the internet. It is getting paid that is the trick. The telemarketing gig is basically generating leads for insurance and financial geeks.”
Johnny looked like he almost fell asleep. “Sounds boring. You got a wife and kids?”
It was always the simplest questions that felt like punches to the stomach. I felt impotent and angry with myself. I didn’t want it to show. I replied, “It is boring. I had a wife for about 10 years. She walked out for a plumber with a Harley about 10 years ago. I have a couple of great kids, though. How about you?”
Johnny raised his eyebrows. “No wife, no kids.”
“I always thought you would have had about 40 kids from about 8 different wives.”
He laughed. “That is funny. I always thought so too.” I held out my glass, and Johnny clinked his against mine.
“You just never found the right one?”
Johnny got serious for a second. “No. There were plenty of great women. It is more or less the job. If the man wanted me to have a wife, they would have issued me one.”
“Are you still in the SEAL teams then, or what?”
Johnny paused and looked at me. He looked around and noticed no one was looking at us. He nodded at me and said quietly, “I work for the State Department now.”
“You mean pushing paper in the Pentagon?”
Johnny shook his head and took a big slug off his beer. “I hate that stuff. You know me. I need to be out in the field taking care of business.”
“What? Are you in the CIA or some shit?” I asked quietly. Johnny just raised his eyebrows.
I smiled. Johnny was the real deal. I knew he wasn’t lying. “Bro, I am so proud of you. That is some very cool shit.”
Johnny smirked. “It has its moments.”
As I was about to ask him for some good stories, we were interrupted by Jimmy Moore, an old EOD guy who was now an explosives contractor all over the Middle East. “Attention on Deck. Would the homosexuals at the corner table please come inside for some group pictures.”
“Moore, your dad and brother just left. If you hurry, you might be able to catch them in the men’s room at the bus station. They’re in the stall with the glory hole.” I replied in jest.
Johnny burst out laughing at the insult and slugged me in the shoulder. “Gordo, you fucker. You still got it, man.”
“Let’s go take some pictures. I probably won’t see any of you guys again.” I said as I pushed my chair back from the table.
Johnny shook his head. “Sorry, no pics for me. Strict rules. I will go in there with you guys and take the pictures for you.”
I was surprised. “You can’t have your picture taken?”
“Did I stutter, meat bag?” Johnny said and stood up and walked towards Moore, who was waiting on us to get up and join the others.
 

The course of the evening went from taking pictures, dinner, more drinks, and one macho sea story to the next. Johnny seemed to know what everyone was doing but managed not to say what he personally was up to. I was curious as to what Johnny was doing. I suspected several of the others knew what Johnny was up to and knew it was just not stuff to be talked about. No one bothered asking me too much about my life, and by the end of the evening, their stories made my life seem forgettable. I felt I should have stayed in the Navy, but it just wasn’t me. It was too strict for a guy who was dropping acid and smoking weed on the weekends. I wanted to be in a rock band, go to college, and have sex with coeds who I could impress with my own war stories. Almost thirty years later, the guitar had dust on it, the college degree amounted to a piece of paper on the wall, and the college girls looked at me like one of their dad’s friends when I walked around campus. For me, the weekend reunion was almost deflating and humiliating. It was great to know my old buddies were now American heroes by most accounts. Me? I was the broke vet who went to the VA to get my health care because it was free. I was no one’s hero. I lived paycheck to paycheck in a two-bedroom apartment and wrote for a paper read by nobodies. It was a long plane flight from San Diego back to Cedar Rapids.
 

Chapter 2
 

The Reunion  

The options for the week’s column were pathetic: the ongoing problem with geese shitting all over the amphitheater down by the river, a veterans’ motorcycle ride, or a farm kid raising a pig as a pet. Never was there a chance to write about anything meaningful, provocative, or compelling. I turned off the laptop and placed it in my bag. I headed out of the apartment for my telemarketing job. I hated it and all the idiots that worked there. I was surrounded by fat women, ex-cons, dropouts, and drunks taking turns getting their asses kicked on the phone week in and week out until they quit or got fired a few weeks later. The call center was close to the apartment, and, for the most part, I was left alone in my cubicle. I was one of the top reps, the only college graduate in the building, and I still only made $12 an hour for Hawkeye Marketing. They always wanted me to move up in the company, but that meant being responsible for a team of six to eight idiots for $2 an hour more, and I would have to switch to the day shift. I always passed on the offer. I needed something that offered real opportunity, and my future looked bleak.
 

“Yo, Gordo. We are counting on you tonight. We need fourteen more sales to hit our goal, and then we get our pizza night tomorrow.” The twenty-something supervisor said to me in our team meeting before the shift started.
“How about I get half of them, and you let me go home with pay when I do it?” I replied. Talking to the idiots on the phone was almost as painful as listening to my supervisor. The concept was just too heavy for anyone in the building to understand.
“Sorry, Gordo.” He replied with a fake laugh. “Gordo always has the jokes, doesn’t he, team? He’s the guy to catch though. So, let’s have everyone do their best tonight and try and get two sales each tonight.” The supervisor knew the truth: I could get seven sales in an hour, and the rest of the idiots on the team would whine about me getting off early with pay instead of getting two sales in four hours like them. I sat in the corner cubicle away from the others. If I sat around the others, it made me feel even more depressed listening to their stupid conversations about sports, reality TV, or videos they saw on the internet. I was ashamed to even walk in the place, let alone think about what the guys at the reunion would say if they saw me now.
 

The calls were simple; we were asking the clients of insurance and financial agencies to come in for a free family review appointment at the office or their home. The agents would cover their current coverage and then try to sell them more of whatever. The secret to my success was that I told them it was a benefit of being a customer and never asked them if they wanted to do it. “So, Mr. Fartbox, I was just calling to let you know your family insurance review is going to be next week. There is no cost or obligation; we are just trying to make sure we have the lowest cost and the best coverage for you. We try and teach you how to buy it smarter and see if we can save you some money. Are mornings or afternoons better for you?”  I did it about 50 times a night for four nights a week. I told them I could not work Fridays because I had a deadline for the column in The Tribune. They thought it was a big deal that I was a writer for the local paper, so they allowed me the time off. The sad truth was that these were the exact dipshits that read the garbage I wrote about.
 

I got my seven sales in about an hour and a half and opened up my laptop on my desk to look around at the news, some dating sites, and some job sites. The jobs were there if I wanted to work in a factory or drive a semi. The dating sites had some attractive women my age, but there were a thousand idiots making three times what I made as a plant manager or union factory worker. The women loved to chat with me on the internet. Women love to talk and have someone who can carry on a conversation. I could get dates with them, and then it always got down to I had no money, and that was the end. All the good ones were at that stage in their life who were looking for the person to finance their retirement, their home, their vacations, and holidays. I was averaging about a single one-night stand a year for my sex life. It gave me plenty of time to write, but there was no audience for my stories. It was my version of mental masturbation. I may as well have been writing on the bathroom wall.
 

The shift ended, and I drove back home. I got my mail out of the mailbox and noticed a response letter from an agency out of New York. I had sent out several emails and samples of some of my stories, hoping an agent would pick me up and start soliciting my work to publishers. I opened the letter and started reading it as I climbed the stairs to the apartment. It read, “Mr. Danbury. Thank for submitting a few samples of your writing. We have previewed your material and at this time are going to move forward with other selections. We represent published authors who are building on an already established audience and following. We wish you the best in your future.” I opened the door to my apartment and threw the envelope and letter in the pile of other rejects on the coffee table.
 

I poured myself a glass of Woodfield Reserve Cabernet; the best wine for broke wine snobs and dipshits who wanted to impress at the demolition derby. I sat down in front of the television. I could have died right there on the couch, and no one would have given a shit. The kids would get a life insurance benefit from the insurance policy through work, so I at least could say I paid for their college. The Tribune would write an article about me the size of a matchbook in the obituaries and then give my job to a twenty-three-year-old kid fresh out of college without missing a beat. I looked through the rest of the mail: a bill from the dentist, a bill for car insurance, and two coupons for a new and exciting hair replacement cream and this week’s junk mail for the amazing new and scientifically proven fat-busting weight loss formula sweeping the nation; Rocket Loss 3000. I grabbed the remote, turned on the television, and began watching headlines about the fighting in the Middle East. I secretly wanted the job of an embedded reporter rolling with some of the guys from the reunion. I laid back on the couch and fell asleep listening to news analysts argue about the headlines like I did almost every night.
 

The following morning at The Tribune, I elected to take the story of the geese shit. The answer, in my opinion, was to issue a special license to hunters willing to complete a safety course and allow them just to shoot the damn things. The dead geese could be taken to a meat processor in the area and then frozen and given to various homeless shelters for consumption. As I was writing the article, the phone at my desk rang. I had about two hours to make my deadline with the story, and it was almost certain to be the editor’s assistant calling to check on my status.
“This is Gordon.” I answered.
A voice that sounded like a drunk old man on the other end said, “Is this the famous Gordon Danbury? The same guy who wrote about the horse shit at the St. Patrick’s Day parade?”
I hated these calls. It was always some dumbass who thought they were going right to the source of the story and give them their two cents. We were instructed by the editor to agree with them and then try and get off the phone quickly. “Yeah, unfortunately, the marching band had to walk through it.”
The old guy came unglued. “You son of a bitch. That was my horse, Esther. Horses shit, you know. They can’t control it. Who gives a fuck if some goddamn high school kids get shit on their shoes? They can kiss my ass.”
I started laughing and wanted to hang up, but the guy was actually referencing a column piece I wrote a few months ago. “Yeah, the principal of one of the high schools wrote a letter to the editor complaining about…” He cut me off.
“I don’t give a fuck about the goddamn editor. You wrote the story. I should stick your head in Esther’s asshole, but she is dead. She pissed on an electric fence, and it killed her. How would you like your head jammed in a dead horse’s asshole, son?” the guy yelled into the phone.
I put my hand over the phone and burst out laughing. This crazy fucker made my damn day. I hadn’t laughed like that in a good long while.
“I am at a loss for words.” was all I could manage without laughing at him.
“Gordo, you stupid fucker, you know who this is.” The voice was unquestionably Johnny. The thick Brooklyn accent was like a fingerprint.
“I am impressed. That was actually pretty good, shipwreck.”
“Yeah, some shitbag in the Navy helped polish up some of my beats.”
“I didn’t know your mom was in the Navy.” I replied. He burst out laughing.
“Gordo, you crazy fucker. I love you, brother.” Johnny said sincerely.
It touched my heart. “Love always, brother.” I replied.
His tone changed to an upbeat, audible smile. “I just called to let you know you are going on vacation, my man.”
I was confused. “I just went on vacation, bro. I am back rowing with the slaves now. I burned up my vacation time going out to California to see you goddamn guys.”
Johnny laughed in his timeless goofy fashion. “Wrong. I will take care of everything. Pack your fucking bags, flame thrower. Everything has been taken care of or soon will be. There will be a courier drop at your apartment in the morning. You have a 10 a.m. flight tomorrow.”
I shook my head and confessed. “Johnny, I hate to say it, man. I need this job. I don’t have any vacation left and, to be honest, I am a little light on the funds.”
Johnny came right over the top of me. “Gordo, are you fucking kidding me? Are you calling that checking account at Cedar Rapids Community Credit Union funds? I have laid bigger tips on strippers than that account balance. Let me put it this way, this will be the biggest break in your goddamn life. You’re a great guy and a good writer. You are not a good guy and a great writer. You need fucking story and I got one that will be the best story you have ever written. All you need to do is show up. I am only gonna ask you once, shipwreck.” He was serious I could tell in his voice.
“Johnny, I can’t just not show up for work, they will fire me and then the ridiculous checking account goes from humiliating to putting a fucking gun in my mouth, bro.” I had nothing to hide. Johnny obviously knew already I was broke.
“Jesus, stop crying already. Fuck, I have had a gun in my mouth a hundred times. Listen, I told you it will all be taken care of. Do you trust me?” He gripped me right by the heart.
I simply replied, “With my life.”
“Good, get the package in the morning and just get on the fucking plane, champ.” He wasn’t fucking around I could tell by his demeanor. What in the hell he wanted with me I had no idea.
“Fine. I will. Is this your freakin’ phone number?” I asked.
“Are you kidding me? Try calling it back. I will see you tomorrow.” He hung up.
I just shook my head. Only Johnny would have pulled a stunt like that. I loved that guy. I quickly called the phone number back, and it was a recorded message saying the number was out of service. I laughed. I finished typing out the geese shitting story, saying we should have snipers on the riverbank, and their feathers could be used for down pillows and jackets, and sent it to the editor. I shut off the computer, grabbed my bag, and walked out the front door with a huge smile.
 

I drove back to the apartment feeling electric. I could not stop thinking about what Johnny’s story was. He had to know a zillion guys, and there were no shortages of journalists with much better credentials than I had that could write a story. The fact that he knew about the stupid horse shit story at the parade meant he looked me up and read some of my stuff. That part was undeniable. There was also no way he could have had access to my checking account, but I knew he did. I was not sure how he was going to pull off my absence from The Tribune. The one part he missed is that it was my weekend with the kids. The ex was going to be pissed. I had to call. I picked up my mobile phone and dialed the kids’ number as I drove along.
“Hey, Dad.” My son Tye answered.
He was fifteen, and his voice was changing into a young man. “Hey, buddy. I just want to let you know I am not going to be able to have you guys this weekend. I got called away for a big story.”
“Dad, you have to. Mom and Steve are going to Chicago this weekend.” He replied.
“Son, I can’t. I don’t know how to say this other than I am being sent away for work. I have to go. Tell your mom I will take you and your sister for the next couple of weekends in a row.”
“Dad, she is going to be pissed. I don’t want to tell her that. You tell her.” I knew he hated playing the go-between his mother and me.
“Son, I can’t talk to your mom. She just starts screaming and babbling about money.”
“Dad, you owe her a thousand dollars.” He replied. The comment I knew was planted by my ex, guaranteeing it to be delivered. She made more money than me, and she and her new husband were spending the cash on vacations, her new fake tits, and tattoos. It didn’t matter. I was behind on child support. Going to California and skipping out on a weekend with the kids would prompt an immediate call to her asshole attorney, who already threatened to garnish my wages the last time the fucker called.
“How do you know that?”
“She told us. She said if she doesn’t have the money by the end of the month, she is calling her attorney again.”
I shook my head and turned off the radio. “Fuck, are you kidding me?”
“She sounded serious, Dad.” My son sounded deflated.
“I don’t care about her, goddamn it. You know I love you and your sister with everything I have. Unfortunately, I don’t have much cash right now.” I hated admitting this to Tye.
“I know, Dad. I don’t think Mom cares though.” He replied. He hated being in the middle of battles that were always about me owing money. She took them out to dinner, paid for school events, and they had their friends over for spend-the-night parties. I had become the degenerate deadbeat who just made up stories and lived in a fantasy world. I was a has-been in every single one of her stories.
“Listen, this could be an important story for me. If it is a good story, I might be able to use it to get an agent and maybe even some cash.”
Tye sighed and said, “Mom said you should go get a real job.”
I wanted to throw the phone out the window. “Wow, thanks. Tell her I will find a way of coming up with the money by the end of the month and not to call that scumbag attorney again. But, son, I have to chase down this story. It is a very old friend, and he is a pretty important guy. I can’t keep writing garbage for the Tribune for peanuts.”
“I like your stories, Dad.” Tye said. He had to be the only person who I gave shit about who confessed to reading my stories.
“You are breaking my heart here, kid. Tell your sister I love her too, and I will see you guys next weekend.”
“Alright, Dad. Mom ain’t gonna be happy, but I will see ya next weekend.”
It was the worst part of it. I was the smartest, poor guy I knew. Everyone seemed like a success but me. My kids loved me, but it was hard to compete with a mom who took them on vacation, bought them expensive clothes, paid for their phone bills, and more entertainment than was justified or healthy. I was the broke, deadbeat who cooked all the meals, didn’t have enough room for their friends to spend the night on my weekends, and always wanted to check their homework.
 

I pulled into my parking space at the apartment. I climbed the stairs and plopped down on my couch. I called Hawkeye Marketing and left a message telling them I would be sick and, unfortunately, would have to miss pizza night. What a joke. I did a load of laundry and dragged my suitcase out of the closet. I grabbed a glass of Woodfield and turned the oven on to throw in a frozen pizza for my own private pizza night. The phone rang, and I looked at the number on caller ID. It was my ex. I shut the phone off without answering it. I wasn’t in the mood to listen to her bitch and run me down. I knew by not answering the phone, she would be stomping around her house reminding her new husband and my kids what a loser I was and that she never should have married me. This would be followed up by how she was the responsible parent and her attorney would be coming after me. I just shook my head and threw the pizza in the oven.
 

I turned on the news and filled up another glass of wine. It was the same info babes talking about the headlines: war, crime, natural disasters, sports, money, and bullshit on the internet. The women were beautiful, smart, and well-versed. What they were not were writers or journalists. They were hot-looking women reading a teleprompter and introducing retired military or legal “experts” to weigh in on the stories. Nothing was ever too deep or strayed from their overlords’ one-sided scripts. The buzzer on the washer sounded, and I threw the clothes in the dryer. I plopped back down on the couch, ate about half the pizza, then fell asleep.
 

I slept for an unusually long seven hours and was awakened by a huge bolt of lightning that sounded like it exploded in my living room. I jumped up off the couch and looked out through the blinds down to the parking lot. It was raining hard. I quickly logged on and looked at The Tribune’s website. I always went straight to my column. To my surprise, there were half a dozen people who all liked or agreed with my comments on the geese shit. My editor would be happy and pat himself on the back for having the wisdom to hire another minion to carry out his literary vision in the community. I looked at the clock and it was almost 8 a.m. I pulled the clothes out of the dryer, ironed them, and put them in my suitcase. I jumped in the shower and got myself dressed. I cleaned up around the apartment, trying to kill some time, when I heard the delivery truck pull up in front of the apartment. I ran down the stairs to meet the guy before he came into the apartment entryway.
“Hey, you got something in there for Gordon Danbury?” I asked.
“Yup, sign right here.” He said as he handed me a thick envelope with my name on it. I scribbled my signature on his digital pad, and he sped off.
I went back upstairs to the apartment and opened the package. Inside was a small stack of $100 bills inside an envelope containing a single piece of paper. The paper had only my flight and hotel reservation information. It was a business class reservation to San Francisco and a one-week stay booked at the Ritz Carlton. I laughed and tilted my head back. I counted the money, and there was $5,000 in cash on the nose. I almost cried. This would pay off my credit card, bring me up to speed on my child support, and still leave me with a few hundred bucks. The flight was in less than two hours, so I threw my suitcase in the car and drove straight to the ex’s place to pay her before she left.
 

She was in the driveway loading up her car. She saw me drive up and came stomping over to my car, which I parked in the street. “You think you are just going to dump the kids on me this weekend, asshole?”
“Listen, I got sent away on a story. It is an important piece, and I even got an advance.”
“Really? What are you writing about now? Let me guess, loser deadbeat dads?” She replied with that snotty look I always hated and her hand on her hip. I can’t believe I truly loved the woman with everything I had at one time in my life. Now she looked and acted like the usual bimbo on the back of a motorcycle.
“Good to see you too. Actually, I came to pay you the $1,000 I owe you.” I said as I opened the envelope. She looked at the stack of $100’s as I counted out her money.
“Where did you get the money? Are you selling drugs now?” She said in her demeaning little voice.
“Actually, it is an advance on the story. I wouldn’t worry about the drugs either. There will be plenty at the next biker reunion for you guys. Maybe there will even be a tattoo and wet tee shirt contest for women forty and above. Your plastic tits and that Chinese tramp stamp can translate into some new chrome for the Harley. As far as I am concerned? Take this money, buy some new shoes, rims for the lawn mower, or whatever you piss your money away on, and mark me down as paid in full. I need to go.” I handed her the money, got back in the car, and headed to the airport.
 

Chapter 4
 

Boat Ride
 

The limo pulled away from the curb at the airport, onto Highway 101 and up the peninsula towards Marin County. Johnny told me the boat was moored at the Marina in Sausalito as we talked about old memories. I didn’t want to bring up the story because, to be honest, I am not sure if the limo was bugged with listening devices or cameras. I had no idea what Johnny was wanting me to write about, and I thought it best to let him bring up the subject.
“I really miss San Francisco.” I said as I looked out the window, watching the landscape pass by.
“Hard not to.”
I turned to Johnny and smiled, nodding my head. “I had a lot of great times in this city back in the day.”
“You ain’t the only one, bro.” Johnny replied. I thought about our times chasing girls years ago, but I suspected Johnny had some memories leaving a bigger impression than ours of decades ago.
“I really don’t care for Iowa. I mean, it has a few good points; it is cheap to live there, no traffic jams, and my kids go to a good public school for about $100 a year. It pretty much stops there.” I admitted.
“I have been to a lot of places, never Iowa.” Johnny replied.
“Don’t waste your time. It is a demographic and geographic yawn. Where are you living these days?” I asked.
“I lived in Virginia since I left the Navy. I just sold my house. I think I am coming back out here.” Johnny answered while staring out the window at passing traffic.
“Retiring?” I asked. He was a couple of years older than I but definitely had twenty years of service at a minimum.
“Yeah, technically. This shitty news is I found a few weeks back I have brain cancer. I was having these bad headaches, and they did an MRI and CT scan. It is a tumor in my cerebral cortex. They want to start me on chemo, but I said no. It isn’t going to make any difference. They said I have about three to six months if I don’t. They gave some morphine for the pain for now. The shit works pretty good.” He replied as a matter of fact, almost expressionless.
I knew he wasn’t lying. No one makes up that story. “Oh, shit.” Johnny brought me out here to tell me he was dying. “Fuck, man. I hate to hear that.” Was all I could say.
“Yeah, me too. That is why I got a hold of you. When I die, all my secrets go with me. That is why you are here. I want people to know what I know, and I want you to write it.”
“You want me to write your biography?”
Johnny tilted his head and raised his eyebrows for a minute. “Yes, and no. The bigger story is not about my life. It is about what I have witnessed and participated in that needs to be let out of the bag.”
“Aren’t you sworn to some lifetime security clearance or something?”
Johnny looked right at me. “Of course, I am. But you are not.”
“Good point. What do you want to tell me?” I asked.
“Let’s wait until we get out of the car and on the boat. The limo is rented, and I have known Richard, our driver, for years. He is an old team guy from SEAL Team 3. He wants to be an actor. He sucks, but don’t tell him that. He is going to be your bodyguard back in San Francisco when we return. It will just be you and me on the boat, though.”
“Bodyguard?” I cocked my head back with a curious look on my face.
Johnny laughed. “Enjoy your wine, shipwreck, and turn on the radio already.” Johnny nodded in the direction of the radio by the bar.
 

I turned on the radio to a classic rock station and sat back down in my leather seat next to Johnny and sipped on my wine. The limo moved further north along Highway 101, and San Francisco came into sight on my right. I felt almost as if I were in a dream. A week ago, I was contemplating my own existence, and now in a single phone call, I was back in California, in a limo, had a little change in my pocket, and a dear old friend wanting me to write his story. The Eagles’ Hotel California came over the radio right as we were entering the Golden Gate Bridge. My heart swelled seeing the ocean and the bay. I wanted to go back in time and do it all over again, but that was impossible. Without Johnny’s generosity, I could spend maybe a week downtown in a hotel, and I would be maxed out on the credit cards. I felt ashamed. After all these years, I was alone, broke, and realizing my life had amounted to a couple of great kids and volumes of scribbled lines no one read. Johnny and all the guys back from EODMU9 were all heroes, and I was a shitbag. I tried not to show any emotion and just filled up another glass of Brunello di Montalcino and kept looking out the window.
 

We pulled off on the Sausalito exit, and the limo pulled into the Marina parking lot. This had to be one of the most expensive neighborhoods in America. The parking lot was about half full of luxury cars. There were more Porches, Mercedes, and Lexuses than I had seen in Cedar Rapids in a year. There was a beautiful Ferrari parked closer towards the water with some cheese dick looking guy talking to a beautiful woman with a dog on a leash. The car came to a stop, and the driver opened Johnny’s door and then came around and opened mine. I finished off my glass of wine and stepped out. The smell of the sea filled my senses, and the boats in the marina were absolute eye candy. Richard popped open the trunk and grabbed my bags, closed the trunk, and followed me as I followed Johnny towards the dock. Johnny typed in a code at the security gate, and we walked through the gate. We walked past half a dozen yachts until we came to a huge yacht with a flying bridge. We walked alongside and over the small brow.
“You have to be fucking kidding me, Johnny. This is yours?” I said as I first glanced around the luxury yacht.
“No, it is a friend’s. He lets me borrow it when I am around.” Johnny said as he typed in a code to open the sliding glass door that allowed entrance inside the living quarters. It was absolutely ridiculous with a modern and stylish living room, dining room, galley, and state rooms up forward. Every bulkhead was trimmed out in a dark walnut trim with expensive-looking art in every direction.
“Nice fucking friend. Is he needing any new friends?” I said as I walked towards the fore.
“He is a cool guy, but he can’t tolerate fags from Iowa.”
“Fuck you, man.” I said as I opened the door to the state rooms. Large king-size bed and private head and shower in each of the two state rooms. “What in the hell does this guy do for a living?”
“He is a big-wig movie producer. If the story comes out right, he is the guy I want to use to maybe have it turned into a movie.”
“Are you serious? A movie deal?” I was stunned. What in the hell was Johnny wanting me to write?
“No, I just made that shit up.” Johnny sarcastically replied. He said something to Richard, and they sat my bags down on the deck in the galley. They walked off aft on the boat. I just stood there shaking my head. I didn’t deserve this.
 

Johnny walked back in, and Richard departed back down the dock without saying goodbye to me. Johnny walked up the ladder off the galley towards the bridge. He reached the top and yelled back down. “Yo, shitbag. Why don’t you cast off the fore and aft lines, and we will get this baby underway.”
“Aye. Aye, bro.” I walked aft and over the starboard side brow. As I touched the dock, I heard the engines fire up. I definitely wanted to get below and check those babies out. They had to be about the size of a car. I loosened the mooring lines both fore and aft. I crossed the brow and noticed it was electronic. I pushed the button, and the brow disappeared below my feet into the deck, and the bulkhead sealed almost seamlessly.
“Underway!” Johnny yelled, and we started moving forward. “Get us some champagne out of the refrigerator, shipwreck.”
“No problem.” I was already pretty buzzed from downing almost the entire bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. I opened the refrigerator and freezer in the galley to notice it was completely stocked on both sides. There was enough food to feed a crew of four for about a week. I grabbed one of four bottles of Moet Chandon inside the refrigerator and pulled down a couple of Champagne flutes from the rack above the sink. It was expensive crystal. I smirked and made my way up the ladder as Johnny piloted us out of the Sausalito marina. I poured us a couple of glasses of Moet and handed one to Johnny.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Johnny remarked as we slowly moved out of the marina.
“Are you kidding me, man? I am still waiting to wake up from the dream back in my apartment in Cedar Rapids. Do you know how much this freakin’ boat costs?”
“Probably a couple of million. I think the studio owns it, and a bunch of them get to use it.”
“And they just let you borrow it?”
“This is where your story comes in, my man.”
“So, what is the storyline?” I asked.
“The truth.” Johnny looked at me as he dropped the hand control and accelerated. The giant boat roared to life, and we cut through the waves as the Golden Gate came into sight. I was laughing like a little boy. I was so happy I felt I would piss my pants. Johnny slowed it down to about half speed so we could talk without yelling. “What the world has been told about 9/11 and Bin Laden was a bunch of bullshit. The Pentagon was not hit by a plane, and the planes that hit the North and South Towers were drones. World Trade Center One, Two, and Seven were all controlled demolitions. Bin Laden was working for us. He provided the manpower and martyrs. We did everything else. The SEAL raid in Pakistan was complete bullshit. Bin Laden had been dead for a couple of years already.” Johnny took a large gulp of the Moët and drained it in one gulp and helped his glass back to me. I was stunned. I filled his glass and tried not to act completely surprised.
“I knew it was all bullshit. I have been saying that for years. I’ve watched a ton of those conspiracy theory videos on the internet.”
“I have seen several too. Several of them we made. There are some good facts in some, but most can’t connect the dots. Tons of the comments and remarks are from guys on the NSA payroll working disinformation campaigns leading the public down rabbit holes intentionally.”
“Disinformation propaganda?”
“Exactly. Conquer by division, farm boy. The more bullshit that is out there, the harder it is to piece together the truth.” Johnny said as he took another swig off his Moët.
“What exactly is the truth?” I asked.
“The truth is the idea had been on the table for decades. Look up Operation Northwoods from the 1960s. Basically, it was the template for false flag operations. Back then, it was trying to build up public sentiment to invade Castro’s Cuba. Kennedy shit on the plan in the end, and the CIA mothballed it.”
“Did Lee Harvey Oswald kill Kennedy?” I asked. I had to know, and Johnny, of anyone I knew, would know.
“C’mon, man. Stay with me here.” Johnny shook his head and threw me a glance like I was a tourist.
I shrugged my shoulders. “Sorry. I thought you might know.”
Johnny shook his head and looked back towards the bow. “Fine, he did. But he was not the only shooter. He was part of a team of Latin snipers hired by the KGB who were working with the mafia. That is not what I want you to write about, though.” Johnny looked at another boat coming at us along our port side. There were some women in bikinis on the front of the boat, and they waved at us.
“I understand. It was just a huge moment in American history.” I tried to play it down that Johnny just confirmed the greatest conspiracy in American history to me as he took his hand off the wheel and flexed his biceps to the ladies as we passed.
Johnny returned to the helm laughing. “Oh yeah, the guy was a shitbag who cheated on his wife and was hooked on pills. However, the story does kind of involve him.”
“Kennedy and bin Laden in the same story?” I was confused. How could these dots be connected? “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“It goes back longer than Kennedy. It started back at the end of World War II. You know what the Bretton Woods Agreement was, Mr. political science degree?” Johnny asked as we approached the Golden Gate and out into open sea.
“It was the invention of an international banking system and the invention of the gold standard, if I am not mistaken.” I replied.
“Look at the big brain on Gordo, ladies and gentlemen.” Johnny teased. “You are exactly right. At the end of the war, we had the most gold and the largest economy. The golden rule is he with the most gold makes the rules. This was Bretton Woods. The agreement allowed countries to trade currency based on a gold standard of $35 an oz. If they ever wanted to convert their paper money back to gold, they could. This was until the Vietnam War came around, and we started running deficits. Countries started getting nervous just holding paper and wanted their gold. Nixon feared a run on the bank and rightfully so. He pulled us off the gold standard.”
I remembered this story from college but never really thought much about it except referencing it for a test. “The great shock. That is when he and Kissinger went over to make the petro dollar deal with the Saudis, right?”
“Bingo.” Johnny looked back at me. “You fuckin’ guys in Iowa are pretty smart.”
“Or bored.”
“That is funny shit. Anyways, forcing countries to convert their currency to US dollars to buy OPEC oil was the greatest ATM fee ever created. Our end of the bargain was to defend the OPEC kingdoms and look the other way on their fucked-up societies. We wanted to do the same thing in Iran, but the Iranians went fucking crazy, and the hardliners overran the damn embassy and nationalized all the oil. They got pissed that the Brits and us were taking most of the cash. Iran looked at OPEC like traitors to Islam. The Saudis had Mecca and Medina and pretty much told Iran to fuck themselves. In the middle of this was Saddam and Iraq. Saddam was an evil and greedy bastard who hated the Arabs and the Iranians.” Johnny recited it like he had been instructing the class I was in decades ago.
“But we helped him in the Iran and Iraq War with satellite photos and intel, right?” I asked.
“For sure. That was before our day, but I know the story. Nonetheless, Saddam was a thug who beat down every other Muslim scumbag in Iraq to rise to the top, and he stayed there. We thought as long as we could contain him and he continued to sell his oil dollars, we let him be a tyrant within his borders.” Johnny finished his glass of Moët and held the empty back to me for another refill.
“Until we whacked him in Desert Storm.” I offered my two cents.
Johnny continued. “Yeah, he took a pretty good blow from Desert Storm, but remember that was done under UN authority to liberate Kuwait. That only took a couple of weeks. The truth was the Saudis were scared that if Saddam could invade Kuwait, he could invade the royal kingdom too. They agreed to pay for the war and did. They got ripped off by every defense industry company out there. They lost tens of billions of dollars by just being straight-up scammed by American defense contractors. In the end, Bush should have kept going all the way to Baghdad, but we listened to the Security Council and pulled out.”
“You got to roll with the SEALs, and I got a letter of appreciation for reorganizing the library on the USS Mt. Hood. I remember it well.” I was jealous.
“That was hilarious. I remember everyone laughing at you guys during the award ceremony.” Johnny looked back and smiled. “Anyways, Saddam’s learned his lesson about war and went back to terrorizing his own people and building palaces from his oil money. This is when Bin Laden enters the story.”
“Were there really no links between Bin Laden and Saddam?”
“None. That was completely fabricated because it sounded good and fit the agenda. Bin Laden’s family were billionaires from construction projects in Saudi Arabia. Osama hated the Saudi Royal family for allowing the Americans to establish military bases and bringing Western culture to Saudi Arabia. He got into it with his own family for building the bases for us infidels. He fled with a ton of money long before Desert Storm into Afghanistan when the Russians invaded in 1979. The next thing you know, he is on the CIA payroll helping to organize the mujahideen to fight the Russians. He organized weapons and cash disbursements we covertly flew in. He was trained by our guys in the big picture stuff: explosives, guerrilla warfare, communications. It worked enough to get the Russians to pull out, but when they did, we dumped him and the mujahideen. The Saudis didn’t want him back, and he was left to be a Muslim bench warmer providing us intel on the Arab world.” Johnny stated as we went underneath the Golden Gate. I looked straight up. Whoever jumped had a long damn way to fall before they hit, I figured.
“So he was on the CIA payroll during and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan?” I asked.
“Bro, that mother fucker was on the payroll until the day he died in 2009.” Johnny said as he accelerated the boat to about three-quarters speed. I stood up and walked to sit beside him in the captain’s chair. I guess mine was the executive officer’s chair. I looked over at the dash. We were cruising along at 20 knots.
“Wow. Continue.” I said loudly.
“What we needed was someone to be able to create just enough chaos in the area to remind all the Arabs they needed to stick with the petro dollar agreement because there were bad guys out there and this was our end of the agreement. Sure, they bought the planes and bombs, but OPEC countries using them in a real war was just not their cup of tea. They looked at the defense industry goods like sports cars to show other rich Arabs. They preferred to send money to Hezbollah in Palestine to fight the Jews and Osama in Afghanistan to plan on terrorism in Iran. We tracked all the money. It was mostly small-time stuff, and we scammed OPEC countries on hundreds of billions of dollars over the years, and they really didn’t give a shit as long as they remained in power and could buy whatever they wanted. Osama was pissed because he was cut out of the big cash loop by both us and the royal family. So, in 1988, he convinces some zombie martyrs to blow up the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania with truck bombs. We were pissed because we didn’t authorize it, and there were some Americans killed. However, it stuck with the theme of bad guys in the neighborhood, and we are here to fight them.” Johnny explained as we rode the shoreline about a mile off the coast.
“He wasn’t in Desert Storm, was he?” I asked.
“No, he was operating out of Sudan in Africa around then. We wanted him to be a thorn in Libya and Egypt’s ass, but the Africans were just too stupid and tribalized to see any big picture, and the huge oil reserves are in the Middle East anyways. After Sudan flopped, we put him back in Afghanistan to try and destabilize the opium trade and keep tabs on Pakistan, who was trying to build a nuclear weapon.”
“How did that work out for you?” I asked, knowing it was a flop because Pakistan admitted they had them.
“About as good as the rest of the drug war has gone. The drug war is a small piece in the big picture. The Pakistanis successfully tested nukes in 1988. What we feared was a nuclear war among various fighting Muslims. It didn’t happen. There were skirmishes between tribes, but nothing seemed escalating until Saddam caught Kuwait slant drilling over the border and stealing his oil around this time.”
“It seemed like terrorism died down after Desert Storm, though.”
Johnny emptied the rest of the Moet into his glass. “It did, and this is also when the Soviet Union collapsed. The Cold War was over, and we won. Our focus switched away from the Middle East and into all the former Soviet satellite countries wanting freedom and democracy. This gave us a huge opportunity to expand NATO and enter those markets.”
I was studying it in a University of Iowa classroom while Johnny was out there boots on the ground. “I remember studying that in college; Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, and the others all bailed out.”
Johnny nodded his head. “Bingo. More countries buying our goods, OPEC oil, and joining Team Freedom and Democracy. Plus, the American banks and hedge funds swooped into the collapsing Soviet Union and bought everything they possibly could at fire sale prices. Gorbachev made the mistake of not staying in power, and when the people voted in Yeltsin’s drunk ass, the entire country almost completely collapsed. The only thing Yeltsin did worth a shit was nominate Putin to become the prime minister in 1999. Putin quickly moved to stop the money flowing out of Russia by consolidating his old KGB buddies, lawyers, bankers, court appointees, professors, the Russian mafia, and oil oligarchs. He was the guy that started talking about shit canning the petro dollar agreement to the Arabs and Chinese.”
I paused the storyline. “I am confused. What does Russia have to do with 9/11 and Bin Laden?” I asked.
“The real threat is Russia taking over the sale of oil to all countries who don’t want to pay the petro dollar ATM fee. If we lose that agreement, the American economy would collapse. Wall St. would go into a tailspin, and a worldwide economic meltdown would happen and more than likely lead to a huge war and more than likely nuclear. The big priority and money is in Europe, and it all funnels through Ukraine, Syria, and Turkey, then further north. We needed a scapegoat to stop it. The Northwoods operation was floated, and resurrecting Bin Laden was the perfect candidate.” Johnny said.
“This is where Kennedy comes in. He might not have authorized the plan, but it was brought to the executive level before he was killed.” I wondered for a second what would have happened if Kennedy had approved it. It didn’t matter because it didn’t happen. What it did confirm, though, was the idea of false flag operations had been concocted by the same government organizations almost forty years later. “Are you saying we invited Bin Laden to take down the World Trade Center?”
“That is exactly what I am saying. He provided the personnel, and we provided the resources and training.” I could tell by the way he replied it was the gospel.
“This had to be a massive operation. How did Bush and Cheney get all of those co-conspirators to sign on to kill thousands of Americans on American soil?” It seemed the obvious question.
“The same way we convinced ourselves to drop the nukes on Japan; it would save lives in the end. Instead of lives this time, it would save the world by avoiding a natural meltdown that would more than likely end with nuclear warfare. If we had half a million guys in Iraq and Afghanistan, it would be impossible to get pipelines from Russia and Iran through Iraq and onwards to Syria and Turkey. Americans wanted the status quo at all costs, and no one would have voted to send 500,000 troops to the desert again without a damn good operation. This is how Northwoods got brought back to the table.” It was absolutely evil, but it made sense. The magnitude of an operation like that would involve hundreds or thousands of Americans. “But how did they pull it off without someone leaking to the media?”
Johnny nodded his head, acknowledging I was following along. “First of all, everyone that was a part of the planning signed to secrecy for life. Q and L clearance levels kept the information at the 4 and 5-star general level, the Pentagon, the White House, and the Supreme Court level. The clearance I signed said capture and execution if I was ever suspected of leaking. There were roughly about two to three hundred people on our side that were involved in the planning from what I could figure out. Bin Laden supplied us about fifty more. Everyone on our team had to agree to spooks coming in your home, planting listening devices and cameras. The cars were all bugged, the wives and kids’ phones were tapped and monitored. If they leaked anything, they knew it came from only one place, and both, or the whole family, would end up dead or disappear.”
I couldn’t believe we would actually kill our own people. Then I realized if the plan was to kill thousands of our own people, a few insiders were definitely not out of the question. In fact, the threat of death to the whole family would be mandatory to even attempt it. “Jesus Christ, Johnny. Why did you sign that shit?”
“They pick you. You sign and agree to carry out the mission before you learn the mission. I didn’t like it from the word go. A lot of people didn’t. I recruited up out of SEAL Team 3 and was tired of a lot of the bullshit in the teams anyways. Once I completed their training and ran a few missions to test my salt, they approached me because I had no family and clean evaluations for years.”
“Why didn’t you get out?” I asked.
“Not so easy. They would ruin you. If they wanted to play soft, they would say you were a spy, ruin your name, ruin your family, cut off all your friends, and hold your trial behind closed doors all the way to the top. Chances are good they wouldn’t fuck around and just have you taken out.” Johnny replied as I looked over his shoulder at Stinson Beach off in the distance. I remembered lying on that beach with my old Swedish love back in the navy days. I still couldn’t forget that crash and burn even decades later. I still kept all the pictures of her. Seeing the beach again intercepted by thoughts even though I was being told the most amazing information I had heard in my entire life.
I looked back at Johnny and said, “Holy shit, Johnny. How in the fuck did they manage to pull it off? I mean, the world has seen the fucking planes hit the towers hundreds of millions of times.”
“Sure, they did, but it wasn’t the same planes. They were drones.”
I had heard this conspiracy theory on the internet. The obvious question I asked was, “Then what happened to the passengers?”
“The passengers on all of those planes and the fucking dirtbags who thought they were hijacking it followed through just long enough to get some phone calls out saying they were being hijacked. None of them ever got in the cockpits, though. The planes were all specially equipped with nitrogen cylinders built into the cargo holds behind false walls. Once the passenger calls were recorded, the nitrogen was pumped into the fuselage, putting everyone to sleep forever. The plane’s pilots flew with oxygen masks just in case and then switched off the transponders. In mid-air, they switched out with drones, gray-colored drones. The original planes were taken to Stewart Air Force Base outside of New York City and secured inside hangars while the drones were piloted into the towers.”
“But what about the bodies on the planes? Where did they go? No one saw the planes land at Stewart Air Force Base?” I asked. Stewart has no base housing on it. It is a New York Air National Guard base. The vast majority of planes were deployed to a decoy operation near Alaska. The remaining people were sent to general quarters stations and away from the air traffic tower and hangars. The planes came in hot and went straight to the hangars. The dead passengers were taken off, put in body bags, and flown out the following day to Area 51 in the Nevada desert. They were all dumped in a giant pit, and then the pit was loaded with a truck full of C4. They were blown to pieces, and any remaining pieces would be left to evaporate in the desert. The rest of the world thought they all died in the crashes.” Johnny’s response was plausible. One base commander at Stewart could control order everyone out of line of sight and direct who was in the tower by simply ordering it during the chaos.
“My God, that is fucking crazy.” As bizarre as that sounded, I could rationalize that. But taking down the buildings was not from drone airplanes. “But what about those scientists on the internet that said that jet fuel could not have burned the steel columns in the towers?”
Johnny replied, “They’re right. Towers One, Two, and Seven were all loaded with nano-thermite charges in the previous month. We had control of security and the elevators through cut-out companies. This is where Bin Laden and the Arabs also helped. They were the fake employees who would push containers around, ride the elevators, and help set up charges. Then they would report back to Bin Laden that it was all happening as designed. Ever wonder why there is zero security footage of any of it? The elevator, stairwells, and core columns were all loaded, disguised, and remote detonators were used once the planes hit. Watch the 9/11 videos again, and you can see the molten metal falling off the side of one of the buildings from the thermite and the squibs below detonating all the way down the building before the clouds of pyroclastic flows make everything disappear.” Johnny looked at me to check my reaction.
He confirmed it. There was no way jet fuel brought the buildings down. “Fuck me. I noticed that shit when watching some of the conspiracy shit on the internet.”
“Brother, please. These internet clowns have been set up long before the first plane hit a tower. There are guys we have running hundreds of sock accounts that troll all of those videos and shit on all of them or pump them if it is a good distraction. YouTube and Google are also controlled by the government. All the big media, communications companies, mobile phones, and tech companies are all controlled by the man.” Johnny slowly turned the boat due north. I didn’t ask where our final destination was going to be.
“How the fuck do they pull that off?” I asked. Everything went to the internet and was the world’s resource for any investigation.
“Simple; carrot or the stick. They offer them the ability to make billions of dollars, file bogus tax returns, and receive immunity from class-action lawsuits or antitrust violations. If they don’t agree, they are guaranteed to be investigated by the FCC, SEC, IRS, and FBI until they implode.”
“Wow, what a grip. So, the shit Snowden released was real?” I replied.
“Fuck yeah, it was. He already pulled the NSA’s pants down, and what we still don’t know is what he has on the CIA. Trust me, there are agents in Russia looking for his ass every day. He will get found and smoked eventually, but we need to find the data first. He’s no dumbass and definitely has it hidden somewhere or has already given it to the Russians. The only way we get that info is to torture that son of a bitch. This is exactly why Trump is terrified of Putin. If he has cracked it and knows the story, it will start the meltdown. The only reason he hasn’t so far is his entire cadre has billions in the US market, and they would all lose their asses if he let it out of the bag.” Johnny looked in his empty flute. “Go get us another bottle of Champagne from down below, shipwreck.”
I hustled down the ladder trying to digest what Johnny just told me. It was absolutely unrealistic and evil. It was all about greed and controlling the wealth of the world. Even worse, I knew he was telling me the truth. I grabbed the bottle and went back up the ladder to the bridge. “What about the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania crashes?” I asked as I opened the bottle with a corkscrew that looked like about $100.
Johnny nodded as if he had heard the question many times before. “Ever wonder why they never found bodies or plane parts?” he replied.
“They found some plane parts and body parts, I am sure of it.” I said. I knew I had read that on the internet somewhere.
“The body fragments were from people in the tower and not on the planes. The reports from the medical examiner’s office also were all vetted and redacted as needed to fit the script. As far as the Pentagon, there was no plane at all. It was hit by a missile. We basically loaded a mobile missile launcher onto one of our reconnaissance ships about 100 miles out to sea. The missile was travelling about 1,000 miles an hour, so very few people would see it unless you were looking right in the direction of the impact zone.” Johnny confessed the piece that never got discussed; the Pentagon. It looked the least convincing of all. The hole punched in the side was completely round. The Pentagon had to be the most heavily guarded and filmed building in the world, and there were no pictures except one shitty photo from a parking lot camera that looked like it could have been a bus or a train car, it was so blurry.
“Fuck, man. I was wondering about that. The hole in the side of the building was perfectly round.” I said as I filled up Johnny’s glass.
Johnny watched his flute as I poured and still spilled it. “Yup. All bullshit. You can even see in one of the photos that got left up there on the internet is a blown-open office a couple of stories up that has an office desk with a phone book on it. If it were the big ball of flames, how is that stuff still there?” Johnny answered his own question.
“So the whole NIST reports and 9/11 report were bogus?” I asked, what seemed obvious after this tale.
Johnny pulled his sunglasses down and looked at me. “What do you think?” Before I could answer, he did for me. “Of course. All the evidence from the New York site was hauled off to container ships that melted it all down for scrap in China. No outside scientists were allowed in or allowed to examine any of the debris for that exact reason. Some science geeks still ended up finding some anyways, but without any support from the government and any reopening of the investigation, it is going nowhere fast.”
It seemed like that was the entirety of the story. I had to ask the most important question. “Do you have any documentation to support any of this?”
“A shit ton, Shipmate. It is all here on this thumb drive.” Johnny reached into his jeans and handed me a plain-looking thumb drive. “You can see it on the laptop down below. There is no password. Just turn it on and insert the thumb drive. It’s all there.”
I couldn’t believe this. I was a little scared now. Was Johnny on the run like Snowden was without telling me? “How did you get it on a thumb drive and out the door?”
“Very carefully.” He said with no further details. “I will let you look at it while we are here out to sea. I have a copy of all of it. You can ask whatever questions you want, but the laptop and thumb drive go over the side before we pull back in.”
“No shit. I don’t want to be caught dead with that shit.”
“If you are caught, you will be dead, I can promise.”
“So what was your role in all of this?” I paused. “Dude, is anyone looking for you?”
“No one is looking for me. I took the medical records to my command at Langley and told them I am done, literally. I told them I need to take a break to collect my thoughts but would be resigning as soon as my leave was burned up. There is no one following me, at least I don’t think so. As far as what I did? I basically kept tabs on Bin Laden and his henchmen.”
I eagerly asked “Did you ever meet him or talk to him?“
Johnny laughed as he was taking a swig of the Moet and coughed it up through his nose. “You are such a fucking tourist, Gordo. The guy didn’t speak English. No, I saw him a ton of times through binoculars and satellite images though. I also saw him get flown off in a Blackhawk when he finally died.”
 “So, the entire SEAL Team 6 raid in Pakistan was faked then.”
“Absolutely. He died in Tora Bora of kidney failure. He had been on dialysis for a few years, and it was an absolute bitch to keep that shit under wraps. We had a team from Johns Hopkins with him off and on for the last couple of years and 24/7 the last couple of months. The raid on the Abbottabad compound was a false flag. The guy that was living in there with his wives was a huge opium dealer and his posse. He actually kind of looked like Bin Laden, though. The SEALs were told Bin Laden had reconstructive surgery and might not look like some of the pics. It was pitch dark, and they were looking through night vision goggles. They were to kill him and get out of the building and man up the perimeter in case the Pakistanis started firing on us out of fear. The CIA then bagged him and sealed it. The Team 6 guys loaded a body bag onto the helicopter. As far as O’Neil and Bissonnette saying they killed him, we let them run with it. It fit the script. But I can assure you it was not Bin Laden. We brought the body of the Arab dealer on the ship and dropped it over the side so the officers on the bridge of the USS Carl Vinson would verify the story.” Johnny stepped back and pointed at the wheel. “Take the helm, shipwreck.”
I couldn’t believe it. This yacht had to be the absolute most expensive thing I had ever been put in charge of. I immediately threw the hammer down and topped it out at 29 knots per hour. For a huge yacht, that is pretty fast. I felt like a king. If my friends could see me now, I thought to myself as the wind rushed past my face. Johnny slugged me in the arm and yelled. “Get some, Gordo!” I carried on for a few more minutes before slowing it down. I saw my Champagne flute had fallen in over, but Johnny had the bottle gripped in his huge paw. I pointed at the bottle, and he handed it to me. I took a huge slug of Moet right from the bottle like a textbook shipwreck. My thoughts drifted back to the story.
 

“What about the guys on the helicopter that crashed on the wall during the raid?” I asked as I kept a lookout in front of us. No one ever seemed to get a story or testimonial from the thirty guys on the other helicopter that hit the wall.
“We didn’t lose anyone, but several Team 6 guys were pretty fucked up, and a few retired out with 100% disability and some fat bonus checks issued through the foundations but paid for out of a government slush fund. They have all been told not a word to anyone and that they would be tracked for the rest of their lives. As far as the bird, an EOD guy put about 100 lbs of C4 on the bird, and it blew up and about half the compound after everyone was gone the following morning. That was the most dangerous part of the op. There were a shit ton of idiots around the compound. We told the Pakistanis to clear the area or we would mow people down. Anyone with a camera would be shot on sight. They fucking blew it as usual. There were still a ton of pictures taken and a few hundred onlookers standing around while he set up the charges. We had about twenty team guys trained on all the geeks in the crowd. We had a translator tell them through a bullhorn it was going to blow up, and they took off running. The team evacuated and were a couple hundred yards away when it detonated. Everyone got out, and the rest was history. Well, at least a manufactured one.” Johnny replied. I found it astounding anyone could have knowledge of all this and even function. How could anything else matter in life when you knew the truth? It was all bullshit, and everyone on the planet mattered so little they didn’t even deserve the truth. The world was spoon-fed a bunch of bullshit. The craziest part is it worked. The vast majority of people who doubted the official story would immediately cast off as unpatriotic, uninformed, or quack conspiracy theorists.
“Absolutely un-fucking real, bro. We have been living a bunch of bullshit just to protect the flow of oil.” I said as I steered us along the most beautiful coastline in America. I was feeling drunk now. The wine, the waves, and the story made my head spin. I couldn’t describe my feeling easily. It was almost like dropping acid without the hallucinations. I felt as if I had been elevated to a different dimension of reality based on the confession of Johnny.
“Bingo. I’ll drink to that.” John held up his flute. I filled and tapped it with the bottle.
I shook my head. “Why me, Johnny?” I asked again. “ I mean anyone in the government will be able to tell we were stationed together at EODMU9. They will know you were the one that gave me the information.”
“They can think whatever they want. I am fucking dying already.” He paused and looked out over the sea. He showed no signs of ill health and looked as muscular and fit as a guy could at his age. “I want the story to be written in fiction. The most realistic fiction novel ever created. I got a publisher already willing to take the story and that includes turning it into a screenplay. Once that is done, it will be sent to Hollywood, brother. You could make a couple million bucks out of it.”
I shook my head and replied, “Johnny, it is worth more a shit ton more than that.”
“It is, but that is enough for you, shipwreck. If you can work out a royalties arrangement that is fine by me. I don’t need any money. I have a shit ton of cash already. I have skimmed off the top over the years. I won’t be around long enough to enjoy that either.” Johnny replied.
I wrapped my arm around his big shoulders and left one on the steering wheel. “Johnny, that is fucking terrible. I feel horrible about your diagnosis.”
Johnny smirked. “We all die, bro. I will drift off and end up breathing into a bag of nitrogen and fall into the deep sleep. I won’t be crippled up and all fucked up. I won’t be burdening anyone with caring for my big dumb ass. Ain’t gonna happen.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was a horrible ending choice: suicide or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. “Johnny, are you fucking kidding me?”
“I am not kidding you, shipwreck. Fuck it, let’s grill some steaks and get drunk. You can start tomorrow. I have a guest coming by tomorrow. You will be anchored out here all by yourself for the day.”
He never mentioned anything about a guest visit. “Who is the guest?”
He started laughing. “You have actually met her before?”
“Oh bullshit. You tell me right now you fucking gorilla, or I won’t write your story.”
“Simmer down, pussy pants. You barely even know her.” Johnny said. There was nothing I could do. If Johnny wanted to, he could have grabbed me and thrown me over the side if he really wanted to.
I could not for the life of me think of a woman Johnny knew that also knew me. “Does she have a friend?” I asked with a smile.
“Sorry, shipwreck. Go get the steaks out from down below and fire up the grill. I like mine medium-rare.”
 

 Chapter 7
 

Q &A
 

Cleaning an abalone and serving it is exactly like cooking chicken Parmesan; clean, slice, egg wash, bread crumbs, and fry in oil. I discovered the small pantry beside the refrigerator was stocked with several dry goods for a longer voyage. The pantry made me wonder how long the yacht could stay out to sea without requiring restocking, refueling, sewage dump, and freshwater. Then I wondered who else had been on the boat. Johnny said it was a Hollywood guy in the film industry, so there could have been some pretty wild parties thrown on the yacht. The entertainment people were not sailors, and chances were good the yacht’s entire career was cruising up and down the California coast as a luxury party boat. The yacht itself also indirectly made me wonder about Johnny’s money. Who in the hell could afford this on a government paycheck? If the president made $400,000, then I suspected Johnny was making half that at least.
 

Johnny and Kathleen hung out on the fantail of the ship talking and laughing while Otis Redding’s “ Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” drifted in towards the galley. I remember sitting on a rock in San Diego years before looking over the ocean when I first joined the Navy. I had no idea what life would bring, but for the moment, I wished time would have stopped. Thirty years later, I have the exact same feeling. I wanted to leave my past behind and forget what came next. I was out at sea on a beautiful boat off the coast of California with a good friend, great food and drinks, and my imagination trying to wrap itself around the greatest story in modern times. 

My thoughts were interrupted by Kathleen laughing loudly at Johnny. I snapped out of my thoughts and back into reality; I was alone. There was no woman laughing with me or entertained by me. It was quite the opposite. I was nothing more than a falling leaf from the family tree blowing in the winds of time. If the yacht sank in the sea in that very moment, Johnny would have a funeral procession escorted by the police two hundred cars long through the streets of his hometown for his funeral. Me? I would have a funeral director looking at his watch and two kids wondering why their father was a failure. The goosebumps covered my skin as the reality sank in; the reason I was a loner is I did not deserve anything more. Who was I kidding? I was the smartest poor guy I knew, and my future was sacrifice, seclusion, silence, and suffering.

“Yo, shipwreck, where’s the food already?” Johnny interrupted my thoughts. I threw on a mannequin’s smile and turned towards him. Johnny’s presence always filled the room, and I was comforted by the fact that at least one person still had faith in me.
“Shouldn’t be long now. Can you grab the peppers, cucumber, tomatoes, and the mozzarella ball out of that bottom bin? I can put a little salt and pepper on those with a dash of olive oil, and it will be a good compliment to the abalone.” 

“Chef Boyardee working his business in the galley.” Johnny said as he dug into the refrigerator.

The galley on the yacht was nicer than my kitchen in the apartment by a long shot. “Yeah, I probably should have been a cook instead of an EOD guy.”

Johnny cocked his head back at me. “You should have never gotten out in the first place. Let’s start there.”

“You want to eat in here or out on the fantail?” I asked.

“It is just going to be you and me. Kathleen is shoving off here in a minute. She doesn’t like seafood and has some other stuff she needs to get done.” Johnny replied as he kept looking at the refrigerator.
 

I figured Johnny had already sex with her for a few hours, and an evening of conversation with myself seemed less appealing than being alone with Johnny. Chasing away a beautiful woman from spending time with a dying hero? This was unforgiveable. I swallowed. “Sure, I understand. We can sit in here and then maybe hang out on the fantail after we eat.” I replied as I turned back to the frying pan and filled the bottom with oil and butter. I turned on the overhead vent to draw the smoke out of the cabin and began cutting up the vegetables while Johnny briefly watched.

“That’s cool. You are good with a kitchen knife, Gordo. I am going to tell her goodbye and help her shove off.” Johnny said and then exited toward the fantail.

“We should be ready in 5-10 minutes.” I wanted to tell her goodbye, but I didn’t want to ruin the moment. If she wanted to say goodbye, she would make her presence known in the galley. She did not. I didn’t hear her boat start, but I saw it pulling away through a portal in the port side bulkhead. The personification of beautiful Kathleen at the helm of an expensive boat pulling away from me, I knew, was an omen.

“You want white wine or red with dinner?” Johnny asked as he returned from the fantail.

“Hey, man. Did I say something to piss her off?” I replied.
Johnny turned his head over his shoulder and made eye contact with me. “Why would you say that?”
“She left without saying goodbye?” I shrugged my shoulders and answered.
“She said you were a sweet guy.” Johnny paused; he could tell I was listening eagerly. “She understood why I chose you?”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“Gordo, I have known Kathleen almost as long as I have known you. She is a forensic analyst for the company. If she thought you were a shitbag, it would have been the first time I would have told her she was wrong.” Johnny grabbed the wine opener out of a drawer.
“I am sorry, man. I just thought I might have pissed her off.”
Johnny cut the cap off the wine, corked it, and brought it to the table. “She is always swamped at work. She sifts through translated transcripts of interviews, trying to connect dots. It is a terrible job, but she is great at it.” Replied Johnny as he took a big slug from the stemless wine glass in his hand.
I glanced at the wine. “Château LaTour.” I had never had a first-growth French Bordeaux wine in my life. The bottle had to be $1,500 minimum.
“That is excellent wine.” Hinting for Johnny to fill my glass. I looked up at him as he poured and made eye contact. “Johnny, the documents on the thumb drive? How did you get your hands on that?”
I was almost certain he was going to tell me it was none of my business, but he did not. “It was given to me by another agent. He’s dead now.”
I rolled my eyes. Imagining a bullet come out of nowhere and smoke me right at the table. I wasted no time and took a huge whiff of the bouquet. It was Cabernet for sure. I could smell the wine from arm’s length. The scent was leathery and smoky. I took a huge slug from my glass, and the tannins hung on my teeth like shower curtains. It was divine. I took another drink and looked back at Johnny. “Wonderful.”
“No, it was not like that. He was assigned to the records department. He stepped on a mine in Vietnam and got rotated into the archives eventually. There was a huge push to turn all the analog and microfiche into digital format. He was just happy to still be allowed to work with the company. He was in there for years. I got stuck in there at Langley with him for my first six months. We got along well. He was a goofball like you, Gordo. I had dinner with him and his wife tons of times. Later, he knew my role in the big picture and he filled me in on the history behind it. His wife died of cancer a few years ago. They had no kids and at 65 the company forced him to retire. We went fishing one time and he gave me the thumb drive. He shot himself about a week later.” Johnny took another swig of his wine with an unremarkable look right at me.
“That is so sad.” I always felt guilt when one of the EOD guys got hurt or killed. I learned at the reunion there were eleven Navy EOD who had been killed in the war. I only knew one of them and barely. It made me feel inferior. I should have stayed in but I knew I would have been number twelve.
“It is. There is a lot of sadness in the world, bro.” Johnny cut a piece of abalone and popped it in his mouth like he were sitting on the mess decks chewing on a frozen fish stick that just came out of the fryer. “Good stuff, Gordo.” Johnny swallowed and popped the other half of the abalone slice in his mouth. “Maybe you are right. You should have been a mess specialist instead of EOD.”
 “I should have been a lot of things.” My accomplishment on the planet amounted to a sparrow’s fart in a typhoon compared to Johnny’s. “I feel terrible about your brain cancer too, man.” Johnny took another healthy drink and gestured for the bottle. “Yeah, me too. But, fuck, what am I going to do about it? I still don’t really notice it yet except for the headaches and blurry vision sometimes. It is getting worse though I can tell. I am already taking pretty high doses of Oxycontin and Oxycodone and a few bottles of some other shit.” He looked me in the eyes and paused. “I have lived an amazing life. I don’t have a wife and kids I am leaving behind. I have nothing except a pile of money, some great friends, and a story no one is supposed to hear because it is protecting the biggest lie ever told to modern man. Once I am dead, the only thing that matters is the story.”
 

It was true. Human life always gets down to legacy and perpetuation of your story. The vast majority of us will be forgotten within a couple of generations. Johnny’s story was timeless. If he turned over a copy of the thumb drive to WikiLeaks and the media, it would be cataclysmic. I was drifting. I had to get back to the story. I had to have some answers to my questions. “How many people do you think were involved in the 9/11 and Bin Laden stunts?”
Johnny didn’t hesitate. “I have always wondered that myself. It was all so compartmentalized. I would say at least half of the SAD/SOG guys, everyone on the Joint Chiefs, everyone in the Bush cabinet, and about half of the ones in Obama’s. Kissinger for sure, that fucker. Who knows how many guys at NSA, FBI, State Department, Treasury Department, Justice Department, and out at Area 51? Then all the Air Force guys? The guys at Rand, Boeing, Northrup, Raytheon, and Johns Hopkins too. I suspect some Mossad guys for sure. There must be some Russians and Chinese that know as well by now. Shit, it is impossible to tell.” Johnny calculated out loud those whom he knew or suspected would be privy to the big picture plan.
“The Jews had something to do with planes?” I wasn’t connecting the dots on an Israeli connection.
“Look at the targets. The World Trade Center was right in Manhattan. Owned by Larry Silverstein, a Jew. You see how much he got paid from the insurance companies for the buildings? There clearly was a controlled demolition in World Trade Center 7 that was not even hit by a plane, and it also collapsed in the exact same pancaking controlled demolition way as the others. This would take a few weeks to load those charges. Remember the failure of 1993 and the first bombing in the parking lot underneath? That was a test run. To bring the towers down required collusion with Silverstein. He believed it would draw America and Israel closer together with our blood spilled together, and America would begin bombing Arab targets in response. This kind of play required access to the very heart of all three buildings at the same time, and that means choice and control of the security companies providing these services. These guys were paid to look the other way while Nano-thermite and RDX charges were placed and concealed in the stairwells and elevator shafts.”
“How much of that stuff have you read?” I referenced the thumb drive.
“Too much.” Johnny returned his attention to the abalone he had forgotten. He paused to chew. “Maybe a third of it. It would take a couple of years of reading every day to get through it.”
“It just blows my mind that so many people allowed it to happen. I can’t believe none of this has gotten out; like a wife or kids who were told and they start leaking it out on the internet.” It just seemed with each additional person involved in the plot, the risk for the truth getting out went up.
“They are all monitored by the NSA for sure. Every agent’s phones, laptops, IP addresses, and their kids are all monitored. By the time you finish training as an agent, everyone is well aware of the capabilities of the company to follow you and track your every move.” Johnny pulled some pills from a vial in his pocket. He poured a small handful of white tablets in his hand and then chased them down with a swig of the Château LaTour and resumed his dinner.
 

There was a moment of silence. I had to know as much as Johnny was willing to reveal or knew himself. “I got some questions about the whole thing.”
“Shoot.” Johnny said as he finished off his abalone and turned his attention toward the salad.
“Do you really think it was all about the petro dollar agreement and advertising for the US defense industry?” I asked.
“No doubt. Look at the pipelines and the shipping lanes. Europe basically has no oil. Most of Asia, India, and Indonesia have little. It has meant trillions of dollars in exchange fees for American banks. Saddam exposed the weak underbelly that has always been there, and we smoked him. Ghadaffi tried the same shit by trading Libyan oil in a new African currency; he got smoked too.” Johnny paused to make sure I was following him. “China just signed a huge new deal with the Russians to supply them with oil and natural gas for decades in a huge agreement outside of the petro dollar arrangement. Other European and Asian countries find this attractive too. They want to be able to bring Iranian and Russian oil and natural gas to Europe; the same product without the ATM fee. This is why ISIS was created. We needed another monster to chase in the desert so we can continue to justify our forward deployment.”
“Why haven’t the Russians or the Chinese leaked the information if they know?” This seemed like an obvious point of exploitation for our adversaries.
“It is a catch-22. If they spill the beans, the market crashes, and their economies go in the toilet too. This brings domestic instability and huge problems to their own survival in power. It is better to always have it like a nuclear weapon they can use in a worst-case scenario, I suspect. They want us to lose gracefully and move back to our side of the planet. They want NATO and OPEC to fall apart and eventually have the Shiites crush the Sunni Arabs. This would guarantee Iran and Russia’s influence over the entire region of Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Turkey. It would offer Mecca and Medina, the two holiest shrines in Islam, to be under the control of the Shiite. This is exactly why we tolerate their goofy costumes, customs, and religions, no matter how ridiculous. It is all because of the petro-dollar agreement. Keeping the US dollar as the premier world reserve currency is what the entire model is based on, right?” Johnny was losing me, and I wanted to stay on track.
I thought for a moment about the files and questions I had typed out. “Let me get back to the 9/11 incidents.” I read from a list of questions I had been gathering. “How did no one see an ICBM coming at the Pentagon? The freakin’ thing was huge.”
 

Johnny looked through the starboard side portal as he replied to me. “It was huge, but still smaller than a passenger jet. It was also flying at about 15,000 mph at top speed prior to precisely hitting the Pentagon. The plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was a drone.” Johnny said as he walked to the fantail of the boat. I closed the computer and placed it in my bag. As I stood to turn around, Johnny re-entered the galley from the fantail running. “We got company. Get down and get ready to fight if they come onboard.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” That was not the response I was hoping for. “What do you mean fight if they come onboard?”
“Sorry, Gordo. Looks like someone knows we are here, and they have guns. This won’t end well.” Johnny was deadly serious. He alerted me there was a boat out in the distance and coming at us while he opened the drawer under the countertop. He chambered a round in the pistol and headed back out the fantail. I heard Johnny start the motor of the yacht, and the capstan begin turning, picking up the anchor and chain. I was nervously sitting on the couch with nowhere to use as a hiding place without getting back out on the fantail and onto the 2nd deck.
 

I could barely make out syllables over the din of the engine as the yacht being revved up. Johnny was talking and then yelling at someone. I could see the zodiac rubber boat come up alongside through a starboard portal. The guys in the boat looked like DNR agents in their darker khaki and green uniforms with bright orange life vests. They motored aft alongside the yacht and began speaking through a bullhorn. “Drop your weapons! Put your hands up and exit the inside of the ship.” A male voice pierced through the hull of the boat and filled the cabin. I stared at my bag. I knew Johnny would never want to get captured with the bag. I had to risk taking a chance of throwing the entire bag over the side without anyone noticing before the authorities in the boat boarded and found it in a search.
 

I stooped down, picked up my computer bag, and turned towards the galley when Johnny backed in from the galley and then quickly raised his gun and pulled the trigger several times. He ducked down and shot a couple more times, and smoke from the shots filled the cabin. “Grab your bag and get up to the bridge. The anchor should be up. Put the hammer down and point the bow south and stay away from the rocks. You are driving. I am going to kick these guys into the sea. They are bleeding pretty good. They will attract the sharks with their bleeding and drowning. I need to take off their life vests so they sink. Now get us the fuck out of here, Gordo.” Johnny ordered me.
I felt my adrenaline rushing through my veins and my focus narrowed to almost zero peripheral. “You fucking shot and killed those guys? Who were those guys?” I yelled as I approached him, and he lowered the gun.
“They were company guys dressed as fish and game guys looking for fishing and diving licenses.” Johnny answered and then walked towards the fantail, and I followed. “I got this one. Check on the other guy.” Johnny said as he grabbed the bleeding cop by the hands and dragged him aft to the gunwale.
 

I didn’t see anyone else on the fantail and so edged closer aft to see if the other guy was in the smaller rubber craft tied to the yacht now. I looked over the edge and saw the other officer floating in the water head up, bleeding from the head and apparently dead or unconscious. “He is in the water over here about ten feet from me. What do you want me to do? He looks like he is dead.” I turned back to say to Johnny only to see him cast the other dead officer into the ocean over the gunwale.
“Fuck him. Get up there and drive us out of here, Gordo. It is already running. It is just like a car. Stay away from the rocks. There will be more company guys coming. I am going to steal the radio from their boat and cut it loose. Head south and stay away from the rocks. Open her all the way up. We need to get out of here.” Johnny replied and turned his attention towards their rubber-hulled boat.
 

I climbed up the ladder on the port side as fast as I could. The sun was setting, and there would be no way we could make Sausalito by sunset. Nonetheless, I grabbed the helm and pushed the throttle forward, and the big boat kicked into gear. I pushed the throttle halfway down, and the boat rocked and crashed into a wave and then rolled. The yacht heaved forward as the large diesel engines below decks grumbled to life and resonated through the deck. Quickly, I looked back and could barely catch a glimpse of the one body floating by the rubber boat as I turned and pushed the throttle full steam ahead; it was dreamlike. I was now running from the law on a murder charge, and I didn’t shoot anyone. I was doomed. “Hey, man. Come up here.” I yelled back at Johnny.
 

Johnny returned from his stateroom with a handheld homing device that looked like a game controller. He turned it on, gave it a second to find itself, and then he placed it in my computer bag. Johnny secured the bag and walked aft through the galley and up the ladder in the back to the bridge with the computer bag in his hands. “Quick, give me your cell phone. We are getting all of it overboard right now. The further we get away, the harder it will be for them to find us.”
I fished my phone out of my pocket and gave it to Johnny. Without a second thought, Johnny threw both my computer bag and phone over the side. “This will be a good one, Gordo, you bet. Just don’t hit the rocks. I am going down below inside and clean up the cabin and see if I can find some more ammo.”
“What in the fuck are we going to do now?” I was now literally running for my life out to sea.
“We are going to run; that is exactly what we are going to do now. We need to ditch the boat, and we will be coming into Sausalito tonight under darkness if we do not get intercepted first. We will probably have to light the boat on fire after we get off it at the dock.” Johnny put his big hand around the back of my neck like a vice and started laughing. He had to be joking.
I had to say something. This plan was getting worse by the second. “Light it on fire? Are you kidding me? They already know who we are if you think they were company guys.”
“We need to destroy the evidence.” Johnny said as he gave me a hearty masculine slap on the back. “You keep us on course for the Golden Gate. Turn on the radar and don’t leave the bridge. Keep a lookout for any incoming boats or mini-submarines too.” Johnny laughed hysterically as he left the bridge.
 

Chapter 8
 

Movie Star
 

I still shake my head and smirk when I think back on that week in San Francisco with Johnny. That week changed my life. No, it was not because I wrote a great fiction story about the biggest conspiracy theory of all time. It was because Johnny sucked me in. American Sucker was the hottest show on television, and Johnny had been trying for a couple of years to get into acting in Los Angeles. He tried to parlay his good looks, size, and resume into Hollywood fame. The break came when his agent told him he could get him a shot on American Sucker, but he had to come up with a good story to suck someone in on. He also had to find someone who didn’t watch much TV. Johnny knew I was a writer and would be the perfect candidate to play along or use as a welcome mat to his fame and fortune. He leveraged the brotherhood of our Navy diver background as a way to get me to play along.
 

Me? I found out the hard way. After our lucky escape off the coast and back to Sausalito under the cover of darkness, I was whisked away in a limousine driven by Johnny’s SEAL buddy, Richard, again. Richard, of course, was not there to keep the CIA or FBI from capturing me. He was there to make sure we killed enough time, and I did not go back to Iowa too early. American Sucker aired on Thursday nights. While I was in the suite in the Ritz Carlton back in San Francisco, freaking out about Johnny shooting the guys on the boat and typing out the story, the producers of American Sucker edited down all the video and audio feeds captured during our weekend on the yacht in time for Thursday’s program: Navy SEAL Finds America’s Biggest Sucker.
 

Right as the phone rang, Richard said he would be right back. He exited the suite, and I answered the phone. It was a woman’s voice. “Hi, Gordo. We have a surprise for you.”
“Who is this?” I didn’t recognize the voice.
“This is Hollywood calling. You are going to be a star. Turn the TV on and tune in to channel 9. I think you will like it.” She said and then hung up.

I turned on the TV and found Channel 9 news was just finishing. I was expecting a report out of Marin that had something to do with the shooting. Then the American Sucker episode began. The host was an idiot in a plaid suit and white shoes. He looked like an alcoholic used car dealer from Cedar Rapids. The first thirty forgettable seconds of the program reminded me why I don’t watch much television; canned laughter, simple themes, poor acting, and everyone is good-looking. Then he said it: “Tonight we have possibly the biggest sucker in American history captured by a real Navy SEAL.” Then the screen showed a picture of Johnny that had to be at least ten years old shooting a machine gun in the desert somewhere. Then up popped a terrible picture of me looking off in the distance. I knew right then I had been taken for a ride and was about to be humiliated in front of forty million Americans watching their televisions.
 

The first minute was interviewing Johnny, and what a stud he was. Johnny said, “I love you, Gordo. You are the best. I am looking forward to reading your story.” Then he burst out laughing in his goddamn Brooklyn laugh that made me just shake my head and say, “Oh, you fucker.” The producers edited the video and audio down to the syllables that made me look the dumbest and most gullible. Erased were all the parts that gave any credence to me being a writer. The host of the show said I worked as a janitor for a small Iowa newspaper. The spin was the poor old vet down on his luck who would have his life turned around by an old vet buddy pimping him out? What a shit TV show.
 

The show concluded in half an hour, and I shut the TV off, expecting Johnny to call. The phone never rang. I had no mobile phone or laptop because Johnny made me throw them over the side as we were running from the film crew filming our daring escape. I knew my phone would be blowing up with people saying they saw me on television and how stupid I was to believe Johnny. Richard was probably leaving skid marks in the parking ramp, and I was too embarrassed to even go down to the bar in the lobby, fearing I would be recognized. I popped a bottle of champagne and looked out of my window over San Francisco. I knew it was too good to be true.
 

I took a cab back to San Francisco International Airport the following morning and flew back to Cedar Rapids. Not one person recognized me in the airport. This confirmed my belief that reality TV stars are nobodies that are forgotten as soon as the television is turned off. Back in Iowa, I got my phone replaced and checked my voice mail. I got a call from everyone I knew, it seemed. My kids had friends at school tell them they saw me on television. Then the episode was uploaded to the internet and had over a million views in the first week. Most who reached out thought it was cool; some said they didn’t know I was a SEAL, and I had to remind them again that I was not. Others told me I was stupid to fall for it and they could tell right away he was lying to me. On my desk back at work, my nameplate on my cubicle read Janitor. The Tribune was never told I was going to be testifying in a secret classified case. They knew the whole time. On my desk was a letter from the producers of American Sucker explaining the stunt and a check for $2,000 to cover my salary for the week I was out.  

The real break, however, came a few days later when I received a call from a producer with American Sucker. Apparently, the American Sucker episode I was on was the most watched episode they had, and they wanted to try me on another one of their shows: The Hustler. It was another reality TV show that was part survival and part trivia to advance to the million-dollar round. The guy told me if I won, I would get about $600,000.00 after taxes. If I didn’t win, I would still get $10,000 for being a contestant. I knew Johnny set it up, but when the tickets came, I told my boss at The Tribune if I won, I was quitting. If I didn’t win, I would need to use some of my sick time balance.
 

A month later, I was out in Los Angeles with some other random Americans on a giant obstacle course. There were twenty of us, and we were split into ten teams of two. Lucky for me, I was matched up with an attractive athletic woman in her twenties named Karly. She did the obstacle course, and I answered the trivia questions. In short, we kept winning, and I flew out every weekend for a month to film it. It was huge news in Cedar Rapids, and the Tribune ran a story about me every week. I was a local celebrity, and people in town I did not even know would wish me luck when they saw me. Attractive women on dating sites started hitting on my profile, wanting to go out with me. I knew it was all bullshit, but I loved it. It felt great to be recognized and wanted.
 

In the final episode of The Hustler, it got down to Karly and me against a gay guy and chick on steroids. The guy on their team ran the obstacle and ended up falling off a rope swing into a pool of water, penalizing their time. Then the muscle-bound idiot woman could not name an American territory other than Puerto Rico. Karly beat the fag on the obstacle course by about fourteen seconds, and the question that won each of us $600,000 was up to me. “All right, Gordo, here is your big chance to win it all. Are you ready?” the host of the show asked.
“Ready as I can be, I guess.”
“Good luck. Can you name four islands in the state of California? You have one minute.” My heart raced. I could name half a dozen. I paused for a minute, nodding my head and concentrating.
“Hmmm…. Mare Island, Treasure Island, Catalina Island, and…” I almost said Coronado, but I wasn’t sure because the Silver Strand that connected it to Imperial Beach further connected to Mexico. I was at a loss. It was as if time stopped. I felt frozen. I knew there were several in Los Angeles but had been to none of them. The clock got down to thirty seconds, then fifteen. I was stumped. I was going to look like not only the biggest sucker in America but also the biggest dumb ass. Then I thought about the island the SEALs train on off San Diego. “San Clemente Island would be the fourth one.” I said right before the buzzer sounded.
 

The lights started flashing, and confetti dropped from the ceiling of the studio. Karly ran up to me and gave me a big kiss and pushed her boobs into my chest. Two models came out, and with big checks they held in their hands that said $1,000,000.00 on each. They handed one to Karly and one to me. I stood there just shaking my head. I knew somewhere out there Johnny was watching and laughing.
 

Back in Iowa, the actual amount was $660,000.00. The Tribune put me on the front cover: “Gordo the Great wins a Million!” the headline read. I spent half the money on a nice house on the outskirts of town. I got a new car and put $100,000 away for the kids’ college. My online profile started blowing up with local gold-digging women who just a few months previously skipped right over me and on to the next guy to bankroll their shopping and vacations. I was going to quit my job, but I was offered a promotion to senior staff writer. Apparently, the city adopted my idea of hiring the sharpshooters to kill off the geese, and in Cedar Rapids, that qualifies one as an intellectual. My salary doubled, and I got my own office.
 

I never did hear from Johnny again. I think Johnny knew my retaliation for that gimmick would be unbearable. I always pictured his big-ass head laughing around some table telling people about the American Sucker episode. I also never did write the story. However, I did spend many a day thinking about our conversation and the files on the thumb drive. There was no way those were fake, and there was no way Johnny just stumbled across those. If it was true, Johnny wouldn’t be around long either. I wasn’t even sure what the hell Johnny even did for a living. I wasn’t even sure Johnny had brain cancer either. Was he really going to release those documents to WikiLeaks? Was it all bullshit? If he really was a CIA agent and the story really was true, it was a world-class stunt: to tell the world the truth about 9/11 and then laugh it off as if it were all a joke, on me. It was brilliant. Unfortunately, for Johnny, if it were true, he was already dead.
 

The End