“I hid ’em out in the garage.”
“Garage roses! My favorite! What’s the occasion?”
“Nothing, I just wanted to get you flowers.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Did I forget that you forgot something?” She wondered aloud as she smelled the bouquet.
“No.”
“You didn’t cheat on me did you?”
“What!”
“Well, guys usually only bring ‘flowers-for-nothing’ when they’ve done something.”
“Oh, how little ye knows of me.”
“Are you going away on some trip and you want to break it to me gently?”
“No, but that is a good one; I should remember that. No, baby, I just love you and wanted to let you know it.”
“So I can breathe?”
“Yes, as many times as you like and for the rest of your life if you want to.”
“Ahhh Bill, that’s so sweet… thank you.”
“Finally!”
With the roses having gone over well, but the Cardinal’s march to the Rose Bowl not so well — being detoured by two turnovers — Bill felt he couldn’t take the defeat tonight, so he switched off the TV and headed into the den and his e-mails.
There he found a report on the CERN, and he started skimming through it. A half hour later, Janice found him. “You’re in here? I thought you went out without telling me.”
“Sorry honey, just catching up on black holes and destruction of all matter as we know it.”
“Is that going to give you nightmares?”
“I’ll just have to hold on to you tighter.”
“Then read more, Billy boy, read more. I am going up and getting ready for you.”
He closed the report and jotted down a note on the cover, ‘Create CERN task force. Use rings and Joey. Skip Burrows, Jason Wallenford?’
Then he turned off the light and headed up the stairs two at a time.
III. UNDERCURRENTS
In the first nanosecond, everything he saw all around him would simply disappear, the instantaneous end of the concept of ‘solid.’ Everything, every molecule, every atom would suddenly fall apart, its basic ability to hold together dissolved. For a few millionths of a second, it would all be an instant liquid, and in a few millionths of a second more, the concept of liquid would no longer exist, as all that was once matter became a version of plasma. The most minute pieces of existence would suddenly be ripped apart into a gaseous fog, until even that dissipated into nothingness. Within the first seconds the earth would cease to exist. In ten minutes the entire solar system would vanish, then everything in creation, and in time, which itself would be dying, everything that ever existed would become non-matter.
With that apocalyptic thought, The Engineer took one last drag on his Gitanes Blonde. Maybe it was the late autumn fresh air flushing his lungs or the bucolic panorama of Lake Geneva surrounding him, but once again he vowed to give up these ‘Gypsy women’ one day. He snuffed her under the toe of his Italian designer shoe, unaware of the small ritual cough that always punctuated the extinguishing of a cigarette. He walked back to his rented Smart Car to drive to the next surveillance spot he had marked on the map of Switzerland.
Mush took one last drag and flicked the butt off the bridge, twenty-five feet above the waterline, as he scanned the small amount of ocean that lay between the Nebraska and the former Midway Naval Base.
Allowed a rare honor, Brooke was “up top” beside him. She noticed that in the Pacific’s setting sunlight, his red beard was incandescent. “I heard someone below refer to Big Red. Is that what they call you — Big Red?”
Mush turned and let out a small laugh. “No, Agent Burrell, the boat is Big Red.”
Brooke gestured to his head of red farm boy hair under his blue-and-gold peaked cap with the words Nebraska SSBN 739 and You sleep. We’ll watch and mused, “You’ve got to admit, what are the odds?”
“Lady, the only way you get a boat named after you in this man’s Navy is to be dead first. And between you and me, that’s a big price tag.”
“Okay, so help me out here: big black ship…”
“Boat.”
“Sorry, boat — nothing red on it that I can see.”
Mush turned to her and brought the back of his hand to his mouth as if to block others from hearing him whisper, “University of Nebraska … Cornhuskers?”
“Big Red! Oh, right, of course.” Brooke turned both her palms up and weighed two imaginary things. “Football, thermonuclear war, it’s a natural match.”
“Are you saying we’re playing a game out here?”
“No, but I had four brothers and I know what boys like.” She turned three hundred sixty degrees and surveyed the ship submersible ballistic missile nuclear, as the Navy lovingly called it. “Yep, this is what boys like.”
“There are women in the Navy, you know?” He said.
“I was one… you know.”
“So, you think this is all just the next male evolutionary step after football?”
“My temporary boss was a quarterback in college.”
“Click! White House, quarterback, Quarterback Group, Wild Bill Hiccock!”
“That was impressive!” Brooke genuinely was impressed, but she quickly chided herself. After all, everything about her was top secret.
He patted the part of the superstructure they called the sail. “They don’t give the keys to one of these things to just anybody, you know?”
“Is that so, Big Red?”
He turned and looked at her, the low amber sun having its effect on her as well. She was looking forward, the wind gently blowing her golden hair. It was then he noticed how the arc of her top lip over her straight bottom lip gave her the look of confidence and perpetual awe, as if she was always seeing something that enticed her. And how, when all that was pointed in his direction, he lapped it up. But now that he saw she gave the same wonder-struck expression to the sea, he felt knocked down a peg.
“You’re staring,” Brooke said, without deflecting her gaze from the vast blue before them.
“I never did this with a woman.”
That caused her to turn with the slightest of smirks.
“I mean, the bridge is a kind of men-only environment,” he covered.
“In that case, I am glad we have two lookouts ten feet above us. Otherwise a girl’s reputation might get compromised. But thank you for proving my point!”
“I did what now?”
“No women on the bridge — it reinforces my earlier postulate.”
“So wait, Agent Burrell, are you saying if women ran things, then boats like this on extended deterrence patrols wouldn’t exist?”
“No, not that far, because some side might have foolhardy boys on their boats, and America being caught flat-footed would really be too big a price tag.”
He smiled, folded his arms on the edge of the railing and scanned the horizon. She picked up the binoculars and did the same. Minutes passed.
“Are you married?” Brooke asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh,” she didn’t know why, but she wasn’t expecting that answer. She adjusted her mindset. “Where’s your wife now?”
“You’re standing on her.”
Brooke tried hard to lasso the smile that busted out of her like a wild horse from the corral. “You start singing ‘Brandy’ and I am jumping off this boat and taking my chances back in the ocean.”
“You mean, ‘my life, my lover, my lady is the sea?’” Mush crooned.
“Oh, God, yes! That was my prom song! Because the Homecoming Queen was Brandy Hanson.”
“I would have bet on you for high school heartbreaker.”