The United States of Air: a Satire that Mocks the War on Terror (16 page)

“Poo-ee, they hate us for our freedoms, dog.”

“That right, dog,” said the second tech. “They be hating us for the right to be thin.”

The two techs chest bumped. Their bellies jiggled. “We the Air Force, dog!” they shouted, and grabbed each other by the ears and stomped the floor. “Go the Power of Air!”

Too Secret For You stood at my elbow. “May I?” he asked reverently.

Everyone seemed to hold their breath. I handed him the photo. It was like announcing the brunch buffet was open, back in the bad old days. The crowd cleared, the techs blasted back into their seats.

Too Secret For You put the photo into a slot in the copper tank. Then—nothing. Silence. All around us in that bunker, thousands of keyboards clacked as analysts studied defecating bottoms. Pipes overhead gurgled with their worldwide sewer residues. Glassware on lab tables clinked together.

Too Secret For You bent over his toolbox, riding his lug wrench back and forth. Finally he leaped to his feet and shouted, “We got the mothereater, boys!”

O’Shitt put his hands behind his back. “On screen.”

But Too Secret For You strutted about, pumping his fists like a wide air receiver after making the game-winning touchdown in the Super-Thin Bowl. He sang:

I’m too secret for this job

too secret for this—

“NSA GUY WHOSE NAME I DON’T KNOW!” the General thundered. “TEN-HUT!”

Too Secret For You stopped and looked around him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Were you speaking to me?”

“Share some of the joy with the rest of us,” Erpent said.

Too Secret For You bent over his toolbox again. He unzipped his fly and inserted his wee-wee into a biometric reader. “I cross-reffed the photo against our entire giga-figa-hugga-bigga-lugga-chugga-migga-zigga-byte database,” he said. “Let me show you what I found.”

He continued to slide himself in and out of the biometric reader while he talked. “This data stream is classified Prophet Prophet Bo Boffet Secret,” he explained. “It requires constant authentication. A sort of dead man’s switch.”

“Let’s hope he’s not a premature ejaculator,” Green said.

“I shouldn’t think so,” Too Secret For You said, sighing with apparent pleasure. “This is my fourth authentication today.”

A satellite photo of Cuba—I mean, Poo Island—appeared on the big screen. It zoomed in on Havana. The roof of a resort hotel appeared, fringed with palms, blue pools, a white beach to the north, the ocean. Hundreds of empty tables filled the spaces between the pools.

“Our orbiting Sewer Eye In The Sky took this photo of an unknown fat man in Cuba yesterday,” Too Secret For You said, humping the biometric reader. “Guess who?”

The image zoomed again. Fuzzy at first, it showed a group of men sitting around a table pool-side. The table was covered in a yellow tablecloth with a pattern of red circles and green squiggles.

“Funny-looking tablecloth,” the General grunted.

Where had I seen that pattern before? The image resolution improved, and it hit me.

“It’s a pizza!” I said, and pointed.

“What is, partner mine?”

What we’d all thought was a tablecloth was actually a six-foot-wide pizza pie. Green saw it at the same instant.

“Gotcha,” he said, and pounded his palm with his fist.

“What have we got?” the General asked.

“Leaving the US of Air for the purpose of consuming addictive caloric substances is forbidden by the Amendment,” I explained, wiping away tears of joy. “That tablecloth is actually a giant pizza!”

Too Secret For You adjusted the resolution one more time with his lug wrench, and the faces of the men became clear. One man gazed up at the sky, saluting the heavens with a champagne flute. He seemed to be looking straight at us.

At me.

It was Fatso, all right. And his clothing was spattered with food stains. The sort of evidence that Food Court judges love.

“It
is
him!” exclaimed the first airman. “From the photo!”

“You know I got a sister addicted to Ding Dongs?” said the other airman. “All because of that monster there.”

“Have no fear,” O’Shitt said. He patted the airman on the shoulder. “Our revenge shall be swift and terrible. Fatso will regret the day he set himself up against this great nation, the Holy Land of Air. Major Turdd!”

His aide jumped to attention. “Sir sir sir sir sir!”

The General pressed his lips together tight and grim. “Set our status to FOODCON ONE.”

Eleven

“With or without sprinkles?” Turdd inquired.

The General considered for a moment. “With.”

The major spoke into a nearby telephone. “Set status to FOODCON ONE. Auth Code Smoothie UpYours Cheesecake KitKat Milkshake YooHoo DingDong IceCream Cheesecake KitKat. Repeat, set status to FOODCON ONE.”

“With sprinkles,” the General reminded him.

Turdd repeated the command into the mouthpiece and hung up. A siren blared. Every man, woman, child and donkey rushed to the nearest corner of the bunker.

I raised my voice to make myself heard. “What’s going on?”

“Battle stations,” the General explained. An airman rushed up and handed him an orange plastic bucket with a strap. “FOODCON ONE is the highest level of alert. It means there is an imminent threat of a food terrist attack.”

“But Fatso’s in Cuba,” Green said. “Or was yesterday. What makes you think he’s going to attack the US?”

“I don’t think,” the General growled. “I know.” He strapped the orange bucket around his waist, so that it covered his behind.

The other Air Force staff returned to work, orange buckets attached in similar fashion. Even the donkeys wore extra large plastic garbage bins fixed over their haunches.

“What are the buckets for?” I asked.

Too Secret For You cackled. “They’re not buckets, Too Stupid For Me. They’re butt helmets. In the case of a sewer attack.”

“Sewer attack?” Green asked.

“If French plumbers hack their way into our systems, they could read our thoughts by prying open our butt cheeks and reading our ass lips. They could learn our deepest, darkest secrets. Like the password to my hotmail account.”

“Major Turdd, where are my sprinkles?” the General bellowed.

“They’re coming!”

At that moment it started to snow. I caught a flake and put it on my tongue, but spat it out again.

“Styrofoam pellets,” Too Secret For You explained. “In the case of a sewer attack, sprinkles make it easier to track an enemy toilet cam. Or even an enemy frogman.”

“But what about Fatso?” Erpent asked, strapping on a butt helmet. “Can’t we just snatch and grab him? We got SEAL teams down there, right?”

The General tugged at the foot-long brim of his cap. Showers of fake snow fell at his feet. “If only it were that easy,” he said. “Ever since the Johnson Brothers op, it’s been impossible to get a SEAL team on the ground in Cuba.”

“What’s the problem?” Erpent asked. “Get in, grab him, get out. How hard is that?”

The General sighed. “The feared Cuban Fat Police are everywhere, Agent Erpent.
Los Gordos,
the downtrodden Cuban people call them. Our skinny commandos stick out like celery at a cannibal barbecue.”

“Navy SEALs, Navy SEALs,” barked a technician, in the tenor of that marine mammal, and balanced an invisible ball on his nose.

“Bad SEAL!” scolded his friend. “No fee-shee for you! Have a snack on air, big boy!”

Erpent rolled his eyes. “So issue them fat suits. I got to think of everything for you?”

“Disguises aren’t enough,” O’Shitt said.
“Los Gordos
make sure everyone gorges himself five times a day. How can we ask our fine young men, who have sworn to uphold the Amendment, and believe in the divine principles of eating air, to defile their bodies and minds in this way?”

At that moment Crusteau’s dossier vanished from the screen. Too Secret For You groaned and pressed his wee-wee deep into the biometric reader. We all turned to look.

“Sorry,” he said. “Next time I’ll have to use a condom.”

I had an idea. “What about Cuban dissidents?” I suggested. “There must be air-eating sympathizers down there. People who are horrified at being force-fed by their totalitarian government.”

“It’s a sorry plight the Cuban people are in,” the General said. “For reasons we can’t begin to fathom, they like being fat. For fifty years they were on the road to eating air. And now?” He shook his head sadly.

“There must be something we can do!” I said.

Glum faces turned away from me. No one would meet my eye. Was this it? To come so far—so close to capturing Fatso—only to be stymied once more by our implacable foe, Cuba?

My Twinkie jumped up and down in my ankle holster, celebrating this victory for all Twinkie-kind. It sang:

Twinkies forever, you and me

Twinkies forever, glad to see—

“Nooooooooo!” I shouted at the ceiling, a primal scream of rage and despair.

But the Twinkie song swelled louder and louder until I could hear nothing else. My arms and legs became puppets, enslaved to that cursed pastry’s enchantment. I scooped up a ball of fake snow and threw it at Too Secret For You.

“What the poo was that?” the NSA man demanded. He threw a snowball back at me. It hit Major Turdd.

“Watch it, Plumber,” the major barked.

The General stepped between us, arms raised. “Gentlemen, please!” he said. “There’s no time for this.” He turned to Too Secret For You. “Do we have any idea when Fatso might be coming back?”

“Let me check, Fat Man.” Too Secret For You threw a snowball at the General. It exploded across the ribbons on his chest.

“That’s it,” O’Shitt said. “No more Mister Twenty-Five-Star Nice Guy.” He picked up a handful of styrofoam snow and threw it at Too Secret For You. It hit him in the face.

The return volley pegged an airman working at a nearby machine. Soon the fake snowball fight spread until the entire bunker was involved, tens of thousands of Air Force elite, orange buckets strapped to their behinds, fake snow flying everywhere.

Meanwhile, Too Secret For You tapped away at his toolbox. When the sprinkle fight died down, he said, “We’re in luck. Fatso’s due back in D.C. tomorrow. Six-thirty in the morning. Just enough time to make your deadline.”

The Twinkie song abruptly died. My mind was my own again.

“Why didn’t you say so before?” I asked.

“It was more entertaining watching you throw snowballs at each other.”

“But how do you know he’s coming back tomorrow?” Erpent asked.

“Filed a flight plan with Boring Tower when he left last Wednesday.” That’s the air traffic control tower out at D.C.’s Boring Airport.

“That’s impossible,” Green said. “The Prophet grounded all civilian air traffic two years ago. The Air Force has standing orders to shoot down any plane trying to leave the country.”

“I can tell you what it means,” Erpent said. “Corruption at the highest levels.”

“No!” I breathed.

“Now don’t jump to conclusions,” the General said. “Who approved the flight plan?”

A bony face appeared on screen. He looked like the kind of man who had a fourteen-inch waist. “Air Traffic Controller Blobbalicious Superfattypants.”

“Yikes, what kind of name is that?” I asked.

“Legal immigrant from Ruritania,” Too Secret For You said. He printed out a copy of the photo and gave it to me. “He’s been the sole remaining air traffic controller out at Boring for the last year and a half. The skeleton crew, if you will.”

“Any history of food terrism?” the General inquired. “Family in Fat Camp? Ghetto ties?”

Too Secret For You shook his head. “Not that we know of. FBI ran a background check on him. He came out thin.”

“No air traffic controller can stop fighters from being scrambled,” Erpent said. “That means someone in the Air Force has to be involved.” He stared around at the swarms of technicians in their butt helmets, then at the General himself. “Maybe somebody in this very room.”

O’Shitt stiffened his spine. “You malign the honor and integrity of this uniform,” he said, running his fingertips over his ribbon-covered tunic. “None of my men would ever betray the Prophet like that.”

“I’m afraid the super skinny’s right,” Too Secret For You said, tightening and loosening bolts with his lug wrench. “Someone in NORAD authorizes Fatso’s flights, and prevents fighters from shooting him down.”

The General reeled backward on his heels. Major Turdd caught him in time. “A traitor in our midst!” he gasped. “Who could it be?”

“According to the signature on the flight plan, it was the NORAD-FAA liaison officer, Lt. Cptn. Maj. Col. Bouwelles.”

“Not Bouwelles!” O’Shitt said. “He’s been with us since the beginning!”

“A viper at your breast,” Erpent said. “Sucking the vital air from your lungs. I suggest you call the guards, or I shall be forced to arrest him myself.”

The General straightened his cap. “To think that I’ve been harboring a food terrist so close to my heart,” he sobbed. “All this time!” He shook his fist at the heavens. “I’m not waiting for any guards. Let’s go get the bastard.”

“That could be dangerous, sir sir sir sir sir,” Major Turdd said. “When cornered, food terrists have been known to turn desperate.”

But O’Shitt brushed his aide aside. The rest of us followed in his wake. He waddled the length of the bunker, past the I-SEE-FAT Call Center, past the Poo Propulsion Laboratory, to NORAD itself. Fifty resolute men sat in front of a big screen, ready to respond to a nuclear first strike by Paraguay, Uganda, Luxembourg or even nuke-loving New Zealand. His waddle came to a halt at Lt. Capt. Maj. Col. Bouwelles’s desk, where the man sat laughing into his headphones, his jaws moving up and down like he was chewing on air.

“Sure I can get you a salami, honey,” he was saying. “But what do you want me to do with it?”

The General pulled out a laxative revolver, and the man’s laughter died. The gun was pewter-plated with an imitation ivory handle, and I recognized it instantly. It was a commemorative piece the Franklin Mint issued in honor of the Amendment’s passage. They only made fifty thousand, each one lovingly handcrafted by slaves in China, individually numbered and accompanied by an engraved certificate of authenticity.