"Ever heard of Operation Northwoods?"

Whizzer and I looked at each other, and shook our heads.

"Well, I’m sure you remember the Bay of Pigs fiasco." Jared watched us nod . . . the notion of Whizzer and I being bobblehead dolls brightened the smile on my face. A bone-deep smile I felt clear to my toes. "Kennedy inherited the Northwoods entanglement from Eisenhower, who was obsessed with flushing Castro. Our military had a frightful case of HardRight trots. Commies in our backyard--something had to be done. But there were a lot of goddam pesky rules and faggot liberal morals in the way. So the covert action boys, along with the Joint Chiefs, cooked up Operation Northwoods."

Whizzer said, "That reminds me of a song, or something, maybe because Lude is a joint chief, when he’s not being a nun. And we sure smoked a lot of joints up here in the north woods, before he convented."

I just smiled, bobbling my head and wondering what Jared thought of all the nun biz. He seemed strangely on a mission all of a sudden to tell us about ". . . the operation from Hell. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was a boy named Lemnitzer."

"Rhymes with howitzer, "Whizzer chortled. "Or better yet, it’s a cross between lemmings and howitzers."

Jared gave an amused bobble. "But that’s not why he got the job, had more to do with General Lemnitzer being the darling of the HardRighters. The military leadership was in a lather over the civilian leadership being too liberal, insufficiently experienced, soft on communism. Kennedy was a no-win chief. So Lemnitzer and the boys came up with . . . hhmmm, maybe plan number, oh, six or seven from outer space, and code–named it Operation Northwoods."

Whizzer said, blithely, "Remember the Maine."

Strikingly unmoved by Whizzer’s amazing intuitive leap, Jared said, "They wanted to nail John Glenn . . . wanted to kill Americans on American streets, too, and Cuban refugees in boats. Gory terrorism in D.C. and Miami. Planes shot down, American warships blown up in Cuban harbors--everything blamed, of course, on Castro and his regime. A made-in-America sleight-of-hand circus of treason aimed at rallying support at home and abroad for stomping Cuba."

Whizzer asked, "What about John Glenn?"

"He was to lift off from Cape Canaveral, 1962. Our first real rocket man, carrying the banner of America’s virtues of freedom, truth and democracy into space. Lemnitzer and the boys proposed. . . if the rocket should explode and kill Glenn, they would manufacture indisputable evidence of electronic interference, sabotage by the Cubans. So here was NASA launching the first American into orbit, and the Joint Chiefs were fixing to shoot him down and use Glenn’s death as a pretext for the war itching in their scrotums. Obviously they never got a chance to capitalize on Glenn’s mission, and that stoked them into conjuring new and ever more outrageous operations. Blowing up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo bay was sure seductive."

Whizzer: "Hey, it worked before. Remember the Maine!"

I said, "I thought you believed Hearst and his gang nailed the Maine."

"I think it was either them, or the military boys." Whizzer looked at Jared. "Who do you think it was?"

"I agree," Jared replied. "One or the other. But back to Northwoods. This was all at a time of great concern in American society about the military overstepping its bounds. Too bad it wasn’t publicly revealed that the Joint Chiefs had plans all drawn up to develop a communist Cuban terror campaign in Florida and even D.C., replete with bombings and shootings, hijackings--these boys were determined to get their war no matter what. Americans worried about the military overstepping its bounds, when in fact there was no stepping going on. These maniacs were riding rockets out of bounds. People were thinking in terms of rifles while the military was playing with nukes. It’s unclear if any Northwoods plans made it to Kennedy. General belief says they were screened off and nixed by McNamara, Secretary of Defense."

Whizzer asked, "So how’d you learn about all this?"

"Remember that movie about ten years ago called JFK?"

"I heard of it."

"The movie reignited public fascination with the assassination, so Congress passed an act increasing access to related records. The Northwoods boys were fastidious, but certain records missed the shredder, and surfaced into the National Archives. You can read all about it on the Net. I’ll email the URLs."

"You’ll have to send ’em to Lude, I don’t have an address here yet."

Jared asked me, "What’s your address?"

"I’m not sure, have to ask Nolan."

Whizzer was taking on the look of competitive mischief he often wore when someone appeared capable of challenging him intellectually in a charismatic way. Jared had Whizzer sizzling not only with what he talked about, but how. To me it seemed that for Whizzer and Jared there were only two possibilities: They’d either bond ever more deeply in whatever time was left, or turn against each other, maybe even punch it out?

Whizzer asked Jared, "Whatcha think about the gulf of Tonkin?"

"Never been there," Jared parried, "but I’ve heard it’s beautiful."

Amused, Whizzer slithered himself up straighter in his seat.

We’d all melted down quite a ways. Sympathetic body language pushed Jared and me into following Whizzer’s lead. He kept eyeing the bazooka, and the shrinking blob of tar on the cellophane. Shermie had forgotten his knife; it sat open next to the tar. Our depleted glasses got Whizzer up to hoist the decanter into orbit around the table.

Zach said, "He likes to bite."

Chuckles and bobbles all around, decanter going strong.

Whizzer filled his glass last, and set the decanter down. Instead of picking up the bazooka as I expected, he took his seat and turned to ask Jared, "Whatcha think about those North Vietnamese patrol boats attacking American destroyers at Tonkin?"

"Handy for those military boys who were itching themselves raw to get tangled up in Viet Nam. Lots of suspicion over the Tonkin incident being staged, or at the very least, provoked by us. Many historians call it the ‘phantom battle’.Worked dandy enough that pretty soon we were bombing overtime. Whether or not Tonkin was phony. . . apologists for the Pentagon have always argued that senior officials would never engage in such deceit. Never, ever, scout’s honor."

Whizzer: "Whew! I was getting worried there for awhile." He picked up the bazooka, and commenced the reload.

This was like a fencing match, thrust and parry with hot information, hot interpretation--hot competition to fillet truths most people missed, all preliminary to the astounding coups de théâtre of September eleven. I could feel the inevitability, ready to throw a block on Whizzer if he started blabbering about what happened to me that day.

The bazooka went around once, the two hits I took mere garter snakes compared to the pythons Whizzer and Jared inhaled.

Blue screamed and took off. Zach flapped hard to rise into tailgating Blue. Black and White took to the wing--those birds circulating ten feet above our heads created a crazy, whirling ambience perfect for the resumption of fencing, with me sitting on the fence as it were, bobbleheading. Why do the birds always orbit counterclockwise? Pops just stood rocking back and forth on the keg cooler. I’d never, ever felt so astonishingly comfortable. Every sip of port sent sparkles from my scalp to my soles. Seeming sharp and alert, Jared and Whizzer might’ve passed for straight if not for their rosy eyes, and sticky crackle of their mouths they kept washing away with wine.

Whizzer asked Jared, "So you figure Tonkin was Plan Eight from Outer Space?"

"Uh-huh. And that gets us to Plan Nine."

"Operation Nine-One-One."

"The F.A.A. and NORAD obviously worked in cooperation with the terrorists. Otherwise, the Air Force would’ve intercepted the WTC planes, at least the second one . . . and the Pentagon plane, absolutely. I don’t suppose you happened to catch Dick Cheney on MEET THE PRESS Sunday before last?"

Whizzer shook his head. "Lude and I were on an urgent mission to save everything I own from his wife."

That threw me into a bobble.

Jared said, "Absolutely amazing. You gotta give the veep credit for his public deception skills. He never even talked about the failure to intercept flight, um--"

"Seventy-seven," said Whizzer.

"You sure it wasn’t flight eleven, American Airlines?"

Whizzer got an ephemeral Cheshire look. "It was American Airlines alright, but seventy-seven. Flight eleven nailed the WTC north tower. Trust me."

"I do."

"United flight one seventy-five hit the south tower, flight ninety-three nailed a field in Pennsylvania."

"Hhmmm." Jared pursed his lips, then said, "Orwell would’ve creamed over Cheney’s flourish of hybrid DoubleSpeak. First of all, the WTC planes were never discussed, only flight seventy-seven, the one that most obviously enjoyed all the undisturbed time it needed to complete its mission. And he never directly talked about the actual failure to intercept the airliner, but instead, focused on decisions Bush allegedly made after the Pentagon was nailed. Cheney crowed about all the F-16s and AWACS and tankers they scrambled, after it was too late of course, but let’s not get too technical. Eh?" Jared took a sip of port. "Ahh . . . man this stuff ’s wickedly tasty." He took a drink, smacked his lips. "So, Cheney’s on MEET THE PRESS. Of the millions of viewers, those with any brains had to be thinking: Hey, how could the plane that hit the Pentagon fly around hijacked for well over an hour without anything being done to stop it, when two terrorist planes have already hit their targets? Don’t we have an Air Force anymore? We’ll give you a Mulligan on the WTC planes, maybe you were caught snoring at the wheel, but what about that Pentagon plane!?" Jared really cranked that out, his face turning a closer match to his eyes. "And did Cheney even pretend to answer that question? No. He blathered shitloads of indirection, cool as a gherkin, and emitted clouds of emotional fog . . . out of which finally condensed the falsehood that Bush himself would’ve had to give the order for any of the planes to be intercepted. Truth is, there had to’ve been a presidential order not to intercept for what happened on nine-one-one to transpire. DoubleSpeak is alive and flourishing at the top of the world’s most powerful country. Hail Orwell!"