(Pandora’s Box missile launch system. )

It was the best of times and the worst of times…wait a minute; that has been used someplace. Let me try it a different way. It was a good day tinged with the sepia of coming change. Someone said it had been the best day of the Washington summer, which is to say it was like the upper Midwest under sun with low humidity.

The downside, of course, is that if that was the best, then everything else is on the downward slide. But traffic was light, with a lot of people out of town, and the count-down to the end of the pool season has begun.

I make it about seventeen days until Martin and Adam go back to Poland, then four weekend days with the rag-tag American crew, and then the pool furniture goes back in the basement and the green tarp shrouds the glittering blue water.

“I am not ready for it, Doc. I feel like the summer just got going and now it is about gone.” He took a sip of his Shastafarian Imperial Porter and looked thoughtful. Anyone with eight kids gets pretty good at that, I suppose.

“I would like to have one thing gone,” he said with a scowl. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

“I am all ears,” I said, taking a sip of happy hour white. “Things may be changing here, too, what with Big Jim moving on to a real career in the teaching business. I don’t know if we will continue to get preferential treatment here at the Amen Corner of the Willow Bar.”

Doc looked at the Guerrier warm cheese puffs that Nick was devouring. “I may need to get something to settle my stomach,” he said. “My son just got back from Afghanistan, and we are doing a family dinner when I get home.”

“I am so happy for you, Doc. I don’t know how you endure the time your kids are deployed. Did you hear about the latest awful thing that is out there?”

Doc ordered the Jumbo Lump Crab & Artichoke Dip with toasted baguette off the $6 bar menu from Jeanette, the cute new bartender with the appealing Tinkerbell tattoo on her biceps. “No,” he said. “That might require another porter. What is it?”

“A Russian company is marketing a CONEX-box based missile system they are calling Pandora’s Box. It comes in one of those sea-land metal shipping containers you see on the break-bulk cargo ships and driving around behind semi-trailers. Completely anonymous, but it carries a four-pack of the Novator Klub-K 3M-54TE missiles. The roof of the container folds open and the multiple launch tubes swing up for rapid fire.”

Doc looked at me with the fish eye. “Which does what?”

“Well, Klub is a cruise missile with 300 mile range and delivers a 450 pound payload with excellent accuracy. They say it is one of the deadliest cruise missiles in existence.”

“And in a 40-foot CONEX box, you could launch from a cargo ship or an ordinary semi-trailer at a rest stop on the interstate, right?”

“Bingo,” I said and finished the Chardonnay in the tulip glass. “Imagine one of those gigantic cargo ships unloading them in Baltimore or Long Beach.”

“Wouldn’t Customs and Border protection catch them?”

“They don’t look at everything, and that would only apply to the ports where they have officers. It wouldn’t be hard to get them in some other way. The Russians think there is quite a market for them. Hey, Jim!” I called out. “Can I get another wine and could you get some celery with that crab dip? I am cutting carbs these days.” He nodded back at me from the register down the bar.

“I have some real problems with CBP,” I said. “That jerk in Detroit who hassled me about coming back from Canada after an hour and a half visit to the casino in Windsor. It got confrontational as he looked at my passport and started asking me  bunch of questions that I thought were insulting. I didn’t want to do the slow burn with him, so I took out my retired ID and told him I was a retired Federal officer with 27 years service.”

“Something like that is happening to me,” said Doc.

“Well, it didn’t work for me. In fact, it went downhill from there,” I said. “We had a glare-off until he proved to me that the guy with the gun gets to act however he wants. Petty fascist. We have grown a lot of them since 9/11.”

“That is exactly my beef with the Office of Personnel Management.”

“What’s up with that?” I said.

“Well, I had a secret clearance when I retired from the Navy, but it went inactive. Turns out a contract I am on requires one, so I filled out the SF-86 paperwork to have an investigation done.”

I nodded. “Yeah, keeping your tickets active is the key to full employment around here. If you did not have to have a current investigation and access none of us would be making the bucks that we are. The system is almost a guaranteed full employment program for retired Spooks.”

“I just wanted a Secret clearance, which isn’t exotic at all.”

“No,” I said. “Back in the day that just required a National Agency Check and took a couple weeks.”

“Not any more. Homeland Security doesn’t honor DoD clearances, either. They call it a “suitability” screen, like you can be OK for DoD but not suitable for a domestic clearance.”

“Weird,” I said. “I thought this was all supposed to be about information sharing.”

“Apparently not. More about not sharing and building little bureaucracies. My case got referred to the OPM, and I got the investigator from hell. It has been three interviews and I don’t know what is happening with it.”

“For a retired officer with thirty years of service this should be a no-brainer,” I said. “What do they think? We are going to start importing CONEX boxes with missiles?”

“I don’t know, but this investigator is driving me crazy. You have been through this before, and I want to know if I have any recourse.”

“To what?” I said. “I saw my file on the desk at my last polygraph and it was like two inches thick.”

“That is what concerns me. The last conversation I had with the investigator- a contractor, by the way- starts out with her asking me if,

Based on the date of your marriage and the birthdates of your first three children, do you think you could be subject to blackmail based on their illegitimacy?”

“I was stunned and insulted. I said: had it occurred to you that I married a widow with three kids? It went downhill from there.”

“Crap. I have my bring-up investigation next year, and I hope it is the last one.”

“Do I have any recourse?”

“To these anonymous people?” I raised my wineglass and drained it. “I don’t think so. Once we opened this Pandora’s Box there doesn’t seem to be any going back.”

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com