The United States of Air: a Satire that Mocks the War on Terror (15 page)

“Not the Massachusetts Institute of Toilet Technology!” I exclaimed.

“The very same.” The General nodded. “He’s one of the old-school NSA prodigies. All brains, no social skills. Some say he’s smarter than Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking put together.”

“Wow,” I breathed. “He must be one hell of a plumber.”

“Only thing is, he hates the Air Force. Thinks we never should have taken over the Agency.”

“So why do you put up with him?” Erpent asked.

The General waved a hand at the apparatus that surrounded us. “These machines? He invented them all. Designed the first plumbing-computer interface. Without him, the National Sewer Agency in its current form would not exist.”

We approached the copper tank. The Plumber was on his knees. He had unlocked the handcuffs and was connecting a series of pipes to his toolbox. Without warning, he lifted his lug wrench in the air and started smashing some nearby tubing.

“Leaks! Leaks! Leaks!” he screamed. “Kill the leaks!”

The General put his finger to his lips. “And whatever you do,” he whispered, “don’t mention the word
leaks.
He hates leaks.”

Major Turdd cleared his throat. “You found something?”

“I found another leak,” the Plumber said, panting with exertion. “If it weren’t for you Air Force bubbleheads, there wouldn’t be any leaks.”

“Come now,” the General said. “Do you really think that’s fair?”

“You morons wouldn’t know the difference between a lug nut and a lug wrench if it jumped out of the toilet and bit you on the pitootie.”

“What’s so bad about leaks?” Green asked.

“Leaks! Leaks! Leaks!” the man screamed, and smashed the offending pipes again.

“But what’s so bad about them?” my partner insisted.

“So bad about leaks?” The man stared at Green like he was speaking a ferrn language. “The turd that got away could be the secret to where Fatso is.”

“I thought you said you found him,” Erpent said. He snapped his fingers in the man’s face. “You know where Fatso is, or don’t you?”

“Please,” the General said. “Let me manage this.”

The Plumber clambered to his feet. “Who the poo is this?” he asked, peering at Erpent through his thick glasses.

Erpent was ready with his badge. “I work directly for the Prophet in the Trapezoidal Office. Now spill.”

“Do you know the Auth Code?”

“What Auth Code? I don’t need an Auth Code. I just told you—”

“Then you know nothing, super skinny,” the man sneered.

Erpent stiffened at this rudeness. “What is your name, technician?” he demanded. “I’ll put you in Fat Camp for that.”

The Plumber straightened his shirtfront. A white name patch fringed with red had been stitched to his left chest. It read, “Too Secret For You.”

“I think they need to hear the song, don’t you, Fat Man?”

“No, please, not the song,” the General begged. “Anything but that. Please!”

Too Secret For You punched a button on a nearby stereo. He grabbed the bag of poo we’d brought, now half-empty, and swiveled his hips to the music, the biohazard bag clutched tight to his chest. He sang:

I’m too secret for my shirt

too secret for my shirt

so secret it hurts—

“Enough already!” O’Shitt bellowed.

But the man continued:

I’m too secret for this poo

too secret for this poo

don’t you wish you knew who

I am

too secret for the Air Force

too secret for the Air Force

I’m an NSA man

Too secret

I’m too secret for my—

Erpent stepped forward and turned off the music. “We don’t have time for this,” he snapped. “Did you or did you not find Fatso?”

“Don’t you get pooey with me,” Too Secret For You replied. “I don’t work for the Air Force, and I sure as poo don’t work for the Skinny Service.”

Green stepped between them. “This is an extraordinary piece of sewer technology,” he said, and gestured up at the copper tank. “Is it true you invented all of this?”

Too Secret For You banged his lug wrench against the side of the tank. “Darn pooing right I did. You don’t think the Air Force flyboys are capable of this kind of sewer innovation, do you?”

“Wow,” I said. “Could you give us a demonstration? Too Secret For, umm, Me?”

“Finally,” the man said to the General. “People who appreciate what I do for a change.”

A funnel descended from one side of the machine. He opened the half-full bag of poo and poured it into the funnel. “Always run it twice to be sure,” he said, and flipped a switch. A loud farting sound came from a release valve overhead, and we were soon enveloped in a miasma of rotten egg smell.

The General took a deep breath and sighed with pleasure. “God I love the smell of poo in the morning.”

I looked up at the contraption. “But what does it do?” I asked.

The Plumber reached up and caressed the copper beast. “The Super Dooper Pooper Snooper!” he shouted over the din. “She can analyze any poo sample you care to give her. With this baby I can tell you where the food came from, where it comes out and who else eats a similar diet.”

The farting noise ended. The stench slowly dispersed.

Too Secret For You tapped at the pipes in his toolbox. “On screen,” he commanded. At the base of the tank, three airmen in lab coats sat in front of computer consoles. One pushed a button.

A monitor built into the side of the tank displayed Jacques Crusteau’s dossier. His particulars continued below: date of birth, height, weight, waist circumference, bank accounts, car registration, books taken out of the library—
The Complete Guide To Hydroponics
was flagged for our convenience—plus DVDs rented and TP (Toilet Protocol) addresses of bathrooms across the country where he had gone poo-poo.

Too Secret For You jumped to the Career section. “Jacques Crusteau, French Spy,” he narrated. “Graduated French Spy School, Masters in Sabotage, MPhil in Blackmail, PhD in Assassination. As part of his thesis defense, he whacked the president of Famishedton, a small war-torn former French colony in West Africa.”

“Fascinating,” I said. “But what was he doing in the park last night?”

“What do you think, Agent Stupid?” he said. “What does a French assassin normally do across the street from the Thin House?”

“I dunno,” I said. “Feed the ducks?”

“Feeding the ducks is illegal, moron. Besides, there aren’t any ducks left.” Too Secret For You turned to Green. “Is he brain dead or what?”

“What,” my partner replied. “He’s a believer.”

Too Secret For You whooped. “You mean there’s one left?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

Too Secret For You said, “The assassin was near the Thin House because he wanted to kill the Prophet.”

I had to laugh at that. “Then he was a lousy assassin!” I said. “What’s he going to do, climb the fence? The SS would take him out. Right, Erpent?”

“Not likely he’d make it over the fence anyway,” Too Secret For You said. “His poo is full of cancer markers. The guy was terminal. Had a couple weeks left to live, tops.”

“That makes no sense,” I said. “He’s got cancer, so he wants to kill someone?”

Green lifted his head. “Wants to kill…or wants to be killed?”

Erpent was triumphant. “You see? I was right.”

My partner nodded. “Maybe it was a suicide mission.”

“Of course,” I said. Now it made sense. “The embarrassment factor.”

“Which means,” Green said, “he must have tried to get the whole thing on camera.”

Too Secret For You spun back to his toolkit. “Let’s run this through the psych profiler. If I can find toilet tap videos of this food terrist going ca-ca, I can put together a detailed personality profile.”

“We can read their ass lips,” Major Turdd explained.

On the screen a dozen videos played of someone pooing. The same someone. Too Secret For You tapped furiously away at his toolbox with a screwdriver. “How about that,” he said. “You’re right. It was a plot to blackmail the—the buyer. Did you recover the sound and video equipment?”

Green shook his head. “We didn’t find anything. Someone,” —and here he turned to Erpent— “must have cleaned the corpse.”

“But surely he was transmitting,” Too Secret For You insisted. “Didn’t you find any accomplices nearby?”

Erpent coughed. “We picked up two French spies, actually. Just a few hundreds yards from the crime scene. They were disguised as mimes.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” I exclaimed. “Let’s go talk to them right away.”

“Alas,” Erpent sighed. “There was an accident.”

“Oh no,” I said. I covered my cheeks with my palms. “What kind of accident?”

“They slipped on an invisible banana peel right in front of a speeding steamroller.”

“How horrible!” I breathed.

“Why didn’t you mention this before?” Green demanded.

“It wasn’t relevant to finding Fatso,” Erpent said. “Now can we please avoid these distractions? We have only nineteen hours left!”

Too Secret For You looked up at Erpent for a long moment. He cocked his head to one side, and said in falsetto, “Ma-ma! Ma-ma!”

The Air Force techs laughed and banged their consoles. Erpent drew back a fist, like he was going to take a swing at the man. Before he could do so, Too Secret For You plunged his lug wrench into the toolbox and waggled it back and forth. A map of the US appeared on screen. Bright dots clustered near half a dozen cities.

“Each dot,” he explained, “represents one TP address. One toilet, one poo. Bigger dots, like here,” —he zoomed in on Washington, D.C.— “represent repeated pooings. In his alter ego as Nick Hungry, Crusteau was an important and trusted courier for Fatso. But he was based right here in the District of Crap.”

“Didn’t you hear me before?” Erpent barked. “Enough about Crusteau. You said you found Fatso. Now where is he?”

Too Secret For You reached for the stereo. “You need to hear the song again?”

The General stepped between them. “Please, Agent Erpent! I must ask you to be quiet.”

“That’s better,” Too Secret For You snorted.

He hammered at a tight bolt in his toolbox, and a map of Cuba appeared on the big screen. “A long, narrow landmass,” he announced. “Roughly the shape of a giant turd. Code Name: Poo Island.”

A cluster of bright dots glowed across the strait from Florida. The image zoomed in. “Havana,” he continued. “Capital of Poo Island, and center of the Western Hemisphere’s biggest food smuggling operation. Run, of course, by Fatso.”

“And our boy’s been doing ca-ca there recently,” O’Shitt said, his arms crossed.

Too Secret For You turned his backside toward the General and farted. “Give that man a gold star!”

“He already has twenty-five,” I exclaimed. “But maybe he should get another. If we catch Fatso, perhaps the Prophet will make you a twenty-six-star general.”

“There’s no such thing as a twenty-six-star general,” O’Shitt said gloomily. “Twenty-five is as high as it goes.”

“Then he could create a new rank for you,” I suggested. “What do you think, Erpent? Would the Prophet go for that?”

“The Prophet rewards loyalty and punishes treason,” the SS agent said, his eyes half-closed. “Something you should all remember.” He turned to Too Secret For You. “So what was Crusteau doing down in Cuba? Are you saying that’s where Fatso is?”

“We believe Fatso travels frequently to Cuba to manage his operations there.”

“You
believe?”
Erpent sneered. “You don’t
know?”

Too Secret For You glowered back at the SS agent. “The only thing we know for sure is this.” He twisted a pipe with his wrench. The map of Cuba disappeared, replaced by half a dozen mug shots.

“
These
are his couriers,” he said. “We can trace them because Fatso made the mistake of feeding them all the same diet.”

“What, pizza?” I said.

“Not likely, Agent Stupid Times Two. Fatso forbids his couriers from consuming the product they sell, on penalty of death. They get macrobiotic meals to manage their withdrawal symptoms.”

“Like the Prophet used to eat before he discovered the air-eating way,” I said, remembering that terrible confession in
Food-Free At Last.

“That explains what we saw in the morgue, anyway,” Green said.

“The horror of macrobiotics,” I said. “Addictive brown rice, appetite-provoking steamed vegetables, beans—the heroin of foodstuffs—and nuts.” I shook my head. “The poor misguided souls.”

“What about Fatso himself?” Green asked. “Does he follow the same diet?”

Too Secret For You swung his lug wrench in the air, brought it crashing down on a stubborn bit of pipe. “If only we knew. No poo sample from Fatso has ever been taken. He conceals his activities and food consumption so carefully it is impossible to know for certain what he eats—if he does, indeed, eat food.”

“So where is he now?” Erpent asked.

“Who?”

“Fatso. Who do you think?”

Too Secret For You shrugged. “No idea.”

“But you said you found him!” Erpent shouted.

The NSA man pointed at Erpent and clutched his sides in laughter. “I was just pulling your poo,” he said. “We don’t even know what Fatso looks like.”

Now was my time to shine. I stepped forward. “I’ve met the man.”

Everyone turned to look at me. “We both have,” Green added. “We arrested him too, but he got off on a technicality. I’m surprised you don’t have his image and DNA on file. Don’t you get daily uploads of our arrest records?”

Too Secret For You glanced at General O’Shitt. “Must be a glitch in the system.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ve got a photo of him right here.” I took out my dog-eared copy of the Prophet’s manifesto and turned to the final chapter—“Freedom From Food Means Slavery To Air: Is Going Air-Free Possible?”—where I had used the mug shot of Fatso to mark my place.

The others crowded around, rank forgotten, jostling to get a glimpse of the world’s most-wanted food terrist.

“And to think he lives with impunity right here in the District of Crap,” one of the Air Force techs muttered.

“All because of our laws and our freedoms, can’t so much as touch him,” said another.