* * * * *
Most people don't like living under a shadow. Young Michael Curtis had been born and raised under two! His father, Charles, was a Democratic U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, with a prominent seat on the Appropriations Committee. While his older brother, Trevor, had spent the fall of 1988 as the star quarterback of the U.S. Naval Academy football team at Annapolis, Maryland. But, as Michael had neither a head for politics nor the physical co-ordination vital to contact sports, the only way he had, to relieve his misery, was to heap disgrace on the family name!
So, during the spring break of 1989, he and three buddies from the Magic City campus of Texas Tech decided to leave Palm Springs, California, to do a little bar-hopping in Tijuana, Mexico.
There, at what must have been their fourth or fifth cantina, Michael noticed how raptly the bar tender was watching a soccer game on TV. And, when the team that the latter was rooting for lost, Michael used that opportunity to explain (a little _too_ loudly) just how many ways he felt soccer was inferior to American football. Or, as he so unwisely put it,...
... "real" football.
Faster than you can "Oh, shit!," a fight ensued. With the policia arresting all four of the instigators. And with Michael drunkenly boasting about his parentage. The desk sergeant, taking note of that, made a discrete radiotelephone call to a certain expatriate Cuban who owned a fishing boat in San Diego. The Cuban then RT'd a certain staff member at the Russian Consulate in San Francisco! Twenty-four hours later, Senator Curtis got a phone call of his own at his Georgetown mansion in DC.
If the senator wanted Michael back, alive and unharmed, he was to have his older son, Trevor, visit the tail end of the Reflecting Pool (directly opposite the Washington Monument) at half-past-ten, that night. There, he would hand the caller's partner an envelope containing a traveler's check for one hundred thousand dollars. Any interference by the FBI and/or local cops? And Michael would fry like a moth on a bug zapper.
The senator, of course, thought that was just a figure of speech. But, he was wrong. Because Trevor saw, for himself, that Michael had been shrunken and twist-tied to just that: an electric bug zapper! One that had been plugged into a portable battery pack clipped on to the partner's belt. And the only thing keeping that battery turned off...
...was the partner's thumb on a dead man's switch.
The partner, by the way, turned out to be a woman. A female KGB operative, commonly known in spycraft as a "sparrow." And the ransom drop turned out to be just a pretense for taking infra-red telephoto snapshots of the exchange. In order to extort further "cooperation" from the senator, for something even bigger, later on! Yet, for all this elaborate planning, the caller had made one mistake.
He had used a sparrow, cross-trained by the Heikegani-ryu, to abduct Michael from that Mexican jail.
Now, Chet Northfield has never divulged just how he happened to learn that this particular sparrow was on American soil in the first place. Although, like most of his other "anonymous" tips, he had probably heard about it from his Uncle Jiro. In any case, he used his own brand of ninjitsu to crash the pool party and put the KGB photographer in a sleeper hold. And, when the sparrow returned to their get-away car with the ransom? She wound up getting beaned in the forehead with a Superball!
Thereby stunning her just long to get her mini-skirted ass injected with a needle full of Solution 62 (the same as Chet had already done to the photographer).
Needless to say, it was the Miniscule Operations Command who wound up taking all the credit for aiding Senator Curtis. The result of a certain "special delivery" getting anonymously mailed to Myron Meriwether's office at Langley, Virginia! And the senator, of course, gratefully vowed all kinds of funding for the M.O.C. in the hopes that Michael would, one day, get re-enlarged. What nobody knew at that time, however, is that Trevor Curtis...
...had already been alienized.
How do I know this, more than twenty-five years after the fact? Simple! Laura Petrie's over-confident bragging. During our cyber-telepathic chat, she had made a boastful reference to Senator Curtis. So, naturally, that was one of the first things I checked during the long flight back to Key West from Wisconsin. And, when I saw that Trevor Curtis was now a captain with the Office of Naval Intelligence, I suddenly had a retrocognitive vision of everything I've just described. More specifically? Everything as it'd been seen through the eyes of then-Midshipman Curtis.
Including his "psychotronic indoctrination" at the hands of his girlfriend--and two other alienized baton twirlers--back at his hometown high school.
Unfortunately, Captain Curtis wasn't home when a mixed bag of FBI agents and marine MP's. raided his BOQ apartment at Quantico. Which, in turn, pissed off our Director of Operations. To the point where he almost _broke_ his right fist, pounding the top of his desk in frustration!
"The man was being groomed to be our next ONI liaison officer! Do you know what that means?!"
Naomi Watanabe and I nodded as one. But, Myron kept venting, anyway. Holding up his C-shaped left thumb and forefinger for emphasis.
"He came _this close_ to knowing everything about M.A.C.H.O. Too close, as far as I'm permanently concerned. So, that's it! As of this moment...I'm initiating the Omega Protocols."
Naomi and I looked at each other in shock as he added:
"All personnel to active duty, until further notice. All other cases to be instantly dropped. We---are going---to war!"
THE END...of volume 1
TO BE CONTINUED in volume 2.
Giantess World
Author's Chapter Notes:
MILES STONE'S P.O.V.
Chapter End Notes:
*BOQ: Bachelor Officers' Quarters.
Quantico: the city in Virginia, USA, where the FBI has its training academy on the grounds of a USMC base.
Quantico: the city in Virginia, USA, where the FBI has its training academy on the grounds of a USMC base.