Free Gus Openshaw's Whale-Killing Journal by Keith Thomson

loser,” said Nelson.

P.S. Here’s a scrimshaw Flarq did of Sybil the intern, who works
for Dealer Dan. It’d be a real shame if this picture helped the
authorities catch her. Incidentally, to those of you who’ve been
wondering what the Plus is
for in Dealer Dan’s Illegal
Munitions: they also sell ice.

Wednesday, 21 July 2004 8:03 AM
Dead in the Water
    “Dealer Dan’s on the phone again,” Flarq told me.
“Per the time-honored tradition, to grant us a last
request,” Thesaurus speculated.

This was seconded by the rest of the crew’s long looks.
In just a few seconds, Dan’d be in range to laser lock his
Neptune missiles on our stern. One of those babies could turn
a mountain into driveway gravel. He had twenty-four of those
babies. Plus like fifty other kinds of guns, rockets, and torpedoes.
“Tell him the Cap is in a meeting,” Nelson told Flarq.
“Sucking up to him is our last chance, Nelson,” I said.
“Don’t you think you’re taking this fake bravado business a bit
far?”

“With all due respect, Cap, no.”

“’Cause dudes like him,” I said, doing a Nelson
impression, “are intimidated by dudes who are too cool to give a
shit that they’re about to die?”

“Sometimes, yeah,” he said. “But this time, it’s cause he’s
dead in the water.”

He pointed aft. I saw that, oddly, Dealer Dan’s cruiser
hadn’t advanced at all in the last minute or so. Also, she’d begun
to cant to starboard.

It turned out that a couple of seconds before the F-15
struck the water, while still in the clouds, Moses had managed
to eject. (We’d missed seeing his chute because of the clouds,
the splash, and all the smoke from Dan’s anti-aircraft fire.) Also,
with the help of his “feet that could think all by themselves,”
Moses had paged through the F-15’s manual and initiated a
missile launch. A missile fired just when the jet struck water. On
target. It ripped through Dealer Dan’s hull.
To rescue my on-the-spot choice for Employee of the
Week without getting into Dealer Dan’s firing radius, me and
Thesaurus dispatched the remote control robot squid (we
temporarily took the plastic explosive out of its tail in case that
duplicitous Sybil had an extra detonator). Moses climbed aboard
and was able to ride the squid safely back like it was a jet-ski.
After that, we cruised the heck out of Dealer Dan’s waters. I
don’t think he’ll come after us either, for fear we’ll post his L &
L for real.

The only shadow over today’s victory is that during his
test-drive of the F-15, Moses crossed into a Tortolan No-Fly Zone
and their navy radared it and they’re cruising this way to check
it out. Plus, thanks to Stupid George, they’ve got a scrimshaw of
our brig, the Lucky Sue. So now we got those plankheads and
their Bluepeace puppet masters on our stern again.
Meantime, though, we got us a whale to harpoon.

P.S. Here’s a scrimshaw Flarq
did of Moses. Note: Moses
wasn’t actually wearing a
flight suit or a helmet, but he
wanted to be drawn that way.

Thursday, 22 July 2004 7:55 PM
Supper
    No sooner’d we escape Dealer Dan than Luck paid us one of
her rare visits, in the form of a reliable report of the blubbery
bastard’s pod sighted just six leagues south!
Within seconds, our bullet-quick brig was giving us that
one-of-a-kind rush (at least as far as anyone of us except Moses
knew) of hot, salty air at high speed, and we breathed it in deep.
Every man and rodent among us was feeling the bliss, the thrill,
the whirl, of bounding over whitecaps again, distancing ourselves
from the red-taped-up ways of land, and getting back on the
hunt. And quicker than you can calculate how many miles six
leagues is, from atop the bridge, Stupid George shouted, “Thar
he’s blowing” and pointed at the geyser of mist ahead.
Beneath it was a blimp-sized gray form. Normally, it’d be
incumbent on me to verify that it was in fact the bastard through