Spy Fiction
Mixed With Spy Fact
Crew of the USS Tom Clancy,
A little something different this month.
I ordered the novel Orchids for Mother…and will be reading it over winter break for a future Hunt for Tom Clancy dispatch where we get back to the original method of The Hunt for Tom Clancy by going back into the text.
But, until we do that,
I also wrote a little fiction of my own.
You should be familiar with the characters by now.
If you’re not, watch the embedded youtube video. That’s Mother.
Thank you so much for reading! If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider becoming one (or giving someone the gift of Tom Clancy for Christmas!)
Until next dispatch,
Matt
MOTHER
Mother took Mr White in a taxi to a Chinese place he knew down past the Bowery from the safehouse. The Gin and Tonics, even with the material in the second, slipped down nice, fast. There was no time to touch the droplets that weave tiny beadwork on the highball glass filled with ice and left too long. The Basel Beauties weaved their way into Virginia Slim.
“Let’s get some food, I know a place,” Mother said and then we were on the move. Concrete canyons, daggers of dimming daylight, a sense that the vast man coral could not, would not, hold back the sea. King Neptune kept no clock but the tides, but Mr White knew he would come to claim his vengeance for Bikini and Starfish Prime.
A jousting tournament, taxi as a steed, headlights, lances and then they were there, cabbie paid off with a fistful of fabric, everything in motion, Mother the Black Knight, the Grey Ghost, a shining shadow in his invisible cloak. The vast fabric of his dark toggle coat, pitched over bones and treachery, folded like cold lava.
He held it right up to the round panes perched on sharp cheekbones. Mr White saw on Scarecrow’s face something for the first time, love—lost in the menu, taking apart the words, rolling their sounds in his mouth, feeling their taste and timber.
JJA, the Fisherman, soon reeling in a waiter, asking after his family. Mr White suddenly felt the pull of the fishhook—the material aide to their Gin and Tonics flown in from Queens that day, direct from Basel. It felt to Mr. White as though he were on the other side of the camera lens in a Hitchcock picture as Mother stayed in focus but disappeared as Mr White briefly took vacation from the room, one eye on Jim, Laughing, one eye on the ever growing feast laid out before them and his third eye, hovering above, spinning faster and faster, seeing the small thin threads.
Silver and platinum, plutonium and uranium, all spun into wires only he could see, stretching from that spot in Bowery up the Island to the Rainbow Room and from there accelerated a pinball behind a spring, up and beyond and past it blocking light that traveled a million years to get there, falling short and casting a shadow on the statue in the harbor that nobody saw.