Burial
At Sea
Robert Jordan, which had
not been his name for the first fifty years, stood on the stygian deck of the
anonymous US destroyer as it plowed its way at three quarter speed through a
moonless night surrounded at excessive distances by the other members of its
battle group cruising toward a ceremony which Jordan’s life and life’s work had
brought him to by special invitation of President Harris herself. As he waited for the captain, in whose
quarters he had eaten a late dinner after his helicopter landed, Jordan quietly
considered how thirty years of working devotedly for the greatest enemy of his
new and dearly beloved country had brought about this ceremony and his
attendance. The ship was carrying the
small group of principles to this ceremony along with its regular crew. As the captain, soon to become an admiral,
had explained to him during dinner no one on board even knew that a ceremony
was set to take place except that small group of principals; Jordan, the
captain, the chaplain, and six anonymous sailors all chosen for their top
secret security ratings and all brought in with Jordan from other ships
scattered over the world. Those six
sailors, despite their collective trustworthiness, did not even know the exact
nature of their job that night. It was
2035, more than fifty years after this long, despicable saga had begun and
Jordan remembered that time, when as a young agent in Russia’s FSB or national
spy agency, he had been chosen for what seemed a fairly simple assignment
which, at the time, constituted only a small portion of his entire work load in
New York City where he had been posted after a few years work post training in
Moscow.
His superiors, including
the man who would eventually oversee the entire agency before moving on to
bigger and better things, had considered him a natural for assignment to
America based on a carefully built shadow life as a minor anti-government
dissident and mildly successful business man.
He had grown up traveling the world with his father, a career KGB
officer. Jordan attended the best
private schools where he learned a multitude of skills necessary to an aspiring
spy. He spoke Russian in addition to
English, German, and Spanish, all nearly without discernible accents. He knew the law applicable to the United Nations
and a dozen consortiums of colluding nations on both sides of the perpetual war
of worldwide military, geographic, and economic influence. He was an expert
in the use of nearly every lethal weapon known to mankind although he rarely
found the need to use one. His work was
much more subtle, subversive, silent, and yet equally important to his birth
country and her security forces.
In New York, he was
provided a steady flow of rubles laundered through several ever changing
agencies and individuals which was intended to make his source of wealth appear
impressive and simultaneously indiscernible.
He came and went, a young, intelligent, handsome, and intriguing
immigrant who could often pass for a native of his locale. He remembered now that initial meeting nearly
fifty years ago, in a failing casino in New Jersey, which had ultimately led to
his standing on the blackened deck of a US destroyer, by invitation of the
President, awaiting the final ceremony for the other attendee at their long
past meeting. He had received orders
from Moscow to become an unsuccessful high roller in that slipshod operation in
New Jersey and to make contact with its putative owner. That man was to be characterized by his many
weaknesses, dishonesty, unjustified ambition, amorality, and pathological lack
of veracity. Robert Jordan, in his old
persona and with his original name, had gambled often and poorly until finally
that casino owner, also characterized by his lack of business skills and deep
in irredeemable debt, approached him at the roulette table one night, patted
Jordan effusively and falsely on the back, introduced himself with the words,
“I see you’re losing a little tonight, not like your usual big wins. You’re a wonderful gambler, lucky, very
lucky, my kind of gambler.” If he had
actually been a successful high roller, Robert Jordan knew he would have likely
been spurned by this pathological liar and braggart because his wins would have
further endangered the failing operation.
But the braggart was the object of his work. His superiors, when they gave him the
assignment, had provided some basic information about the man and ordered him
to discern the rest. The object of his
attentions, as Jordan well knew, had applied to Alfa Bank, in Moscow, for loans
which no American bank would give him, millions, many millions, approaching a
billion dollars American had been his audacious and unjustifiable request. But Jordan’s ultimate superior also
controlled much of the commerce at Alfa Bank and was always seeking weak,
manipulable individuals who could be controlled by fueling the sources of their
greatest weaknesses, especially if they also had contacts which led to others
who might someday be able to serve the FSB willingly or unwillingly.
Robert Jordan’s
assignment had been to lead this gullible bankrupt to believe he had powerful
contacts in Russia and to fuel his weaknesses with gifts, bribes, and
enticements intended to draw him in ever deeper much like a fly landing in the
net of a hungry spider. But Jordan also
knew that the target’s gullibility, ignorance, and excesses did not preclude
him from being the kind of person who would walk happily into that web if it
were baited with rubles, women, and unjustified praise.
As a man of some established level of personal honor, Jordan had not particularly
enjoyed some aspects of his work, finding beautiful women willing to go to bed
with any man, no matter how reprehensible, for money. But Jordan found such women, had them brought
to New York from Russia and took two to the casino one night. The bankrupt owner, never one to ignore what
appeared to be a willing woman, approached the table as the two harlots hung on
each of Jordan’s elbows. Both were low
level agents in the FSB and knew their work well. With prompting from Jordan, they catered to
this failing ignoramus and Jordan allowed them to leave him at the roulette
wheel which he immediately abandoned as the three entered the elevator to the
penthouse. His work for that night was
done and he had a positive report to write for Moscow. The women and the video,
obtained too easily via cameras in their jewelry and purses, told Jordan the
next day that he and the women had been successful.
That video was the first such which Jordan placed in an ever growing stockpile
to be used by his superiors at some future time.
Within a few weeks, Alfa
Bank approved the loans which they never expected to collect on in monetary
terms. They knew the payback would not
come in American dollars or rubles. They
were hoping for some other, yet unseen remunerations. They were playing a long term game. They
would wait. Jordan followed orders from his superiors explicitly and developed
a reputation within the agency for quiet but important successes and a great
deal of skill in handling an asset who did not even know yet that he was an
asset. Jordan traveled the world, played
poker, pachinko, and roulette poorly on a few occasions until the casino changed hands, sought
further contacts with this braggart, fed him the lies which Moscow required,
and led the asset to believe that he was a very important man to Jordan. Yet, at the same time, Jordan smoothly
rebuffed the man’s persistent requests to meet someone who could introduce him
to Jordan’s superior who, at that time, was not even recognized as being in
that position by the braggart.
Jordan moved steadily up
the ranks of the FSB, came to know several of his upper level superiors quite
well, developed a growing reputation as a skilled agent, and traveled the world
on various brief assignments which also served to reinforce the asset’s
mistaken belief that Jordan was a successful Russian business man who simply
loved New York.
Finally, with some minor,
overrated and overt support along with even more clandestine support, not all
of which was known even by Jordan, the asset came to be mistakenly seen as a
success by many people on both sides of the Atlantic. He managed to manipulate his way into
management of a second rate beauty pageant and a terrible television show which
painted him as a masterful business man.
He persistently requested Jordan to grant him access to the key players
in Moscow which Jordan failed to perform but very successfully managed to
present as failures of other contacts rather than himself. Their relationship grew and the agency head
advised Jordan to both nurture and create unreachable dreams for the
asset. Eventually, the man came to
believe he was capable of becoming the leader of the entire free world after he
had been given copies of the biographies and literary works of Hitler, Milosz,
and Machiavelli although Jordan always doubted his ability to read and
comprehend such pithy writing. The braggart hired a second rate ghost writer to
pen what he was certain would be an autobiographical masterpiece, dictated numerous
grandiose lies which converted his multitudinous failures into unrivaled
successes, and finally needed the ghost writer to invent a minimally flowery
and false title for the book which more accurately would have been labeled fiction. He even invited Jordan
to attend his announcement to the world that he aspired to be its most
important citizen. Jordan arrived at the
announcement as late as possible, elbowed in as far as possible from the press
corps, skillfully avoided being photographed, and watched as his intelligence asset, if that were not too magnanimous a
descriptor, rode grandly down a gold escalator, spoke in a rambling fashion to
the press about his ambition, and induced them to graze over a buffet of his
poorly made, over priced, and failing commercial assets. A few days later when he and Jordan met again, he
regaled the FSB agent with a grand description of his plan to become the most
important man alive.
Meanwhile in Moscow, the
man in charge assigned a small team of computer experts to assist the braggart
by hacking and placing grand stories about him in a large group of media
services which catered to the most marginal and least intelligent groups of
citizens of America. The agency director
had no belief, perhaps not even hope, that this work could be successful until
one night while drinking his nightly single shot of Russo-Baltique Vodka he decided
to have his computer experts hack into the state election systems of several
key American states. He rolled the
alcohol around his teeth and tongue, smiled his chilling smile, and realized
that he was a genius, probably the greatest and most devious genius in the
history of Russian intelligence. That very hour, he awoke his chief computer
expert, gave him his marching orders along with a list of the key American
states he wished to steal an election from, and slept like a baby for the first
time in years.
On the morning after the
2016 election, the most important man in Russia awoke to news that his computer
hackers had all earned promotions, smiled his nefarious smile, and finally
deigned to make a brief call to this braggart who had gone to bed the night
before, for the first time in his life, with the full realization that he was
unfit to handle the chore he had usurped.
Jordan read his marching orders from the secretive communication channel
with Moscow and learned that he had been recalled to headquarters for a “much needed
and well earned vacation”. After that,
he found himself receiving no meaningful assignments other than sometimes
giving boiler plate lectures at the FSB training academy and transporting
unimportant people to their unknown assignments around Eastern Europe. The few agents he considered to be his
friends never invited him to their dinner parties and he realized that, despite
his role in the installment of a Russian agent in the White House, he was
now persona non grata within the FSB. Based on his
years of experience, he realized that he was considered to be dangerous to the
agency because he knew too much.
Although he slept little, guarded his safety at a level which he had
never before been required to do, and wondered when he would be eliminated as
had a dozen others who had also known part of the story. He considered his options, death by an agent
assassin, banishment to the gulag, suicide, or defection. In memory of his father and his illustrious
career, Jordan did not act rashly, made no immediate decision about his fate
which he considered to be the one decision which he was still capable of
making, carried out his low level assignments just as diligently as he had at
twenty-five, and hoped that somehow he would be allowed to escape the usual
fate of an agent with excessive knowledge of any major operation.
As he stood on the deck of the destroyer
feeling the throb of the massive American engines, listening to the sound of
hundreds of tons of steel cutting the ocean to foam, and marveled that for
twenty years he had been able to live, escape elimination, and actually defect
to this country which he had come to love and which now considered him a hero
worthy to attend this event. In late
2020, shortly after the election which unseated his former asset, Jordan during
a minor assignment to Ukraine happened
to encounter a man he knew to be a CIA agent who masqueraded as a millionaire
dilletante and world traveler. This was not their first
encounter but Jordan realized he did not wish it to be their last. He took a step only a half dozen or so FSB
and KGB agents had ever done and approached the US agent in the restroom of an
opera house, slipped him a message on edible rice paper, and went to his hotel
to wait. Within six hours, a bellhop
opened his door without knocking, spoke to him in perfect English, and offered
him a life once more provided he made up his mind within three minutes. Jordan used two of those priceless minutes,
left the room as instructed, climbed into the taxi which miraculously appeared
as he stepped out the hotel doors, and left Ukraine, Russia, his homeland, his
identity, and his dilemma forever. The
taxi dropped him at a nondescript warehouse which was held under a non-existent
corporation but used by American intelligence and two hours later he found himself being transported to an airport in a wooden shipping container complete with sound proof walls, food, water,
bedding, and a chemical toilet . After a long, jarring flight, the container
was opened in Seattle and Robert Jordan learned that he was considered a very
important asset to the American Director of National Intelligence and to the
Attorney General.
His Russian life was dead
forever. But Robert Jordan, as he was
now known, was alive, had an identity constructed over the next six months as
he was searched for by the FSB all across Ukraine, Russia, and anywhere else
they had an agent. His Russian identity
no longer existed and eventually with plastic surgery, intense reading and
testing on this fictional life of Robert Jordan, he came to understand just who
he was and would be until the day of his death, by whatever means it came. He told American agents everything he knew
about their former putative leader, how he had become a traitor, who handled
his treason, how his assets were diverted and concealed as they left Russia for
his use, and just how much he had given the FSB over the last several decades. The worst part of the entire ordeal was the
time he spent, concealed in a series of remote locations, testifying over
closed circuit television to the grand juries and trial juries which indicted,
convicted, and sentenced the braggart and nearly a hundred of his
co-conspirators. The remote location was
changed daily, sometimes his testimony was cancelled when suspicion of his
discovery made his American handlers jittery.
But after months of testimony, the braggart was convicted of treason,
and Robert Jordan was handed a new life as a retired plumber from another state
who decided to live his remaining years on a small farm growing excellent
tomatoes from heritage seeds along with beans of similar history. He never went to movies or a store. He had no wife, no children, no amusements
other than his garden. But he had
self-respect and he had his new country which he came to love and which had
offered him this last opportunity to be in the same location as the braggart
who had died in a prison cell in Colorado after spending thirteen years in
solitary confinement.
As Jordan heard the
footsteps of the captain and a chaplain on the deck behind him, he smiled and
remembered the voice of President Harris as she had asked, “Would you like to
attend his burial, Mr. Jordan? If so, myself
and our country would be very pleased to give you that opportunity.” Jordan accepted without hesitation, found
himself whisked off his little anonymous farm in a blacked out Chevy Suburban
by four well armed agents, driven to a small military base where he was put on
a plane to another plane at another darkened airport, and thence to the Chinook
helicopter which took him at nearly 200 miles per hour to the deck of the
destroyer along with the plain, well weighted canvas bag which contained the remains of the
old braggart and traitor, and the six anonymous sailors who would be key
players in this last ceremony.
The captain approached
silently from the darkness and stopped beside Jordan. The chaplain strode to the rail over the
water and turned toward the soft sounds of six men carrying a burden across the
deck toward the rail. When they stopped
beside the chaplain, the captain uttered his only words on deck, “Proceed
chaplain.”
The chaplain quoted from
memory in a soft voice which barely made it the ten feet to Jordan and the captain, “To every
thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven, A time to be
born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is
planted; A time to kill, and a time to
heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; A time to weep, and a time
to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. Amen.”
The six anonymous sailors
lifted their burden over the rail, released it, turned to salute the captain, before disappearing into the darkness with the chaplain. Jordan followed the captain back to the
companion way leading to the officers’ quarters in silence. As the door closed behind them, Jordan heard
the captain say quietly, “Beside Osama, as it should be.”
Copyright August 18, 2020
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Author’s Note: While this
story is copyrighted, the copyright is intended only to protect my
authorship. Anyone, any time, anywhere
has my unrestricted permission to disseminate this story on any medium whether
now known or created in the distant future. You may share it on social media, e-mail,
websites, books, magazines, literary journals, or other forms of mass
communication. I do not seek or require
any form of remuneration for this work other than dissemination of the
work. This permission is granted in
tribute to my mentor, Don West, who published his life’s work without a
copyright. The only thing I ask is that
you give appropriate author credit and my brief bio is below.
Biographical Statement:
Roger D. Hicks is an Appalachian writer, blogger, and auctioneer living in West
Liberty, KY. His work has appeared in
“Freshwater”, “Mush”, “Bryant Literary Review”, “Orpheus” at Lindsey Wilson
College, “Now And Then”, “True Christmas Stories From The Heart Of Appalachia”,
“Wingspan”, “Across The Margin”,
“Mildred Haun Review Journal”,
“River Babble” and numerous other venues. He is currently working on a final edit of a
short story collection and a biography of an Appalachian coal camp town.
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