Surely you've seen them rolled up in the MRE packets?
Posted on 06/06/2016 6:39:14 AM PDT by Travis McGee
Mike Dolan came out of the subway, hit the sidewalk and set out down the west side of 6th Avenue with a purposeful stride. Midtown Manhattan never truly sleeps, particularly just before a Monday morning, but compared to what it would be like in a couple of hours, it was geared way down. No tourists yet, mostly delivery trucks and vans. All lanes were northbound, because it was 6th Avenue.
Mike was showered and clean shaven, every item on him and in his possession carefully considered. The white hard hat on his head was the real deal. He wore a gray polo shirt with the embroidered black-and-yellow logo of a crane manufacturer above the pocket. Both items were gifts from old friends. The black cargo-pocket work pants over his Red Wing construction boots were practically new. An iPhone in an armored carrier was clipped to the black nylon rigger’s belt on his right hip. A silver tape measure was next to a small black flashlight on his left. On his back was a compact but heavy pack, also black. In his right hand he carried a small black tool bag, and he held a folding aluminum clipboard case in his left. On the F-Train over from Queens, another early riser had gestured toward Mike’s hard hat, and asked him if the strike was over. Mike just mumbled something about safety inspectors never getting a day off.
After a career spent pounding bolts hanging the high steel, it felt strange for him to be wearing a white hard hat for his trip into Manhattan. The white hard hat and the crane-logo polo shirt were just a disguise for his mission. Like his father before him, Mike was a union man, from the time he got out of the Army, until he’d retired a few years earlier. The New York Ironworkers Local Union 461 had carried him all the way through his family-raising years. Now, the kids were gone, and his wife had passed away.
Mike had always worn a scuffed-to-hell red hard hat with an American flag sticker on the front. Shiny white hard hats were for management pukes way down in the trailers, and for inspectors and reporters and a few other random assholes who would occasionally make an appearance at nose-bleed height. Well, maybe they weren’t all assholes. Some of them were pretty cool, like the construction company honcho who had given him the white hard hat right off his head on the job site parking lot, and offered Mike a salaried position with his big and growing company. That was a line Mike Dolan couldn’t cross—he’d be a union man until the day he died—but it was a welcome gesture. And now that white hard hat was on his head.
After walking a few city blocks south from the subway entrance, the black edge of the forty-story BCA building became visible across the avenue. The BCA building was one of Mike’s two targets, but it was not his destination. The black granite tower was the national headquarters of the BCA television network, including the studios of BCA World News. Another block down 6th, and Mike passed in front of another impressive skyscraper, the fifty-story Grand Hotel. Cabs were waiting under the portico; it was the usual scene remembered from a thousand pre-dawn trips into the city. Hustlers, pimps and low-lifes of every stripe, who were just ending their nights, passed worker bees trudging the other way toward their daily grinds.
While he was approaching 53rd Street, Mike looked around and counted at least four cameras. It didn’t matter. He knew he’d been on film from the time he’d gotten onto the subway. If his mission succeeded, his identity would probably be out anyway. The guy on the F-Train who had asked him about the strike would be giving TV interviews by the twelve o’clock news. So what? It wouldn’t change anything.
The rest of Part One at the link.
No, just a free short story. I should be on novel 6 or 7 by now, and I’m still working on #5. But I don’t see much point in a new novel, because I believe we are going off the rails between now and January. Off. The. Rails.
So short polemical stories mean more to me.
Thanks.
What gullible, ignorant sots knowing nothing beyond their simple preconceptions!
Mike Dolan figures if he’s stuck up there long enough, he can drink it (off camera) and then piss on the book.
He has really planned it out.
Multipurpose fluid. Smart.
He has a lot of other tricks in his “compact but heavy” pack.
Sort of a magic bag.
Bookmark
This should get interesting. I'll be waiting for the next installment.
I’d like to be on the ping list too. Thanks.
Thank you MB!
Bookmark
Yep. The 2A and America’s stubborn serfs — the only thing standing in the way of the NWO’s Kingdom of the Damned.
Heard her use of "we" was considered a bit presumptuous?
Maybe she and Huma performed some kind of private conversion process on their "holy rug."
Can’t wait. :P ! Wish it could be a daily event -but I well know how difficult it can be to write on a regular or semi- regular basis with the unyielding pressure that generates.
So, simply know that I am interestedly anticipating your next installment of this literary milestone.
Cheers!
Surely you've seen them rolled up in the MRE packets?
Down around Fort Huachuca way, we'd call that a *trique bag*, pronounced *trickey bag.*
Yep, lots of interesting stuff in some of those bags!
It’s a good plot device.
Sort of like the “magic conex box,” which when hit by a stray mortar round and destroyed, turns out to have had every piece of lost or missing gear in the battalion deployment inside of it.
We can go in at least 3-4 directions with this.
Meme #2:"But...I've already checked in my 'Privilege' at the FEMA Commandants office!"
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