The piece you’re about to read is from an early draft of Torpedo (now in print as Sea of Shadows).  If you’ve read the book, you may recall that one of the major story threads is driven by an incident at a German nuclear power plant.  This chapter, which was edited out before the book went into print, tells the story of the accident at Niedersachsen Six…

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HANOVER, GERMANY
WEDNESDAY; FEBRUARY 8
1906 hours (7:06 PM)
TIME ZONE -1 ‘ALPHA’

The security guard scrutinized Becka Eckhardt’s ID badge for what seemed like a ridiculously long time, glancing back and forth between her face and the laminated photograph on the badge.  It was absurd. Depending on her shifts, the man had seen her at least three or four times a week for the better part of a year, and every time he acted as though he had never laid eyes on her before.

Becka stifled a sigh of exasperation and resisted the temptation to snatch the badge out of the guard’s fingers when he finally offered it back to her.  Instead, she calmly clipped the badge to the lapel of her lab coat and walked past the guard desk to the big steel security door.

The sign on the door read EINTRAG EINGESCHRÄNKT AUF AUTORISIERTES PERSONAL, in large red capital letters: ENTRY RESTRICTED TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL.  Under it was a smaller sign, also in German — RECORD PERSONAL DOSIMETER READINGS UPON ENTRY AND PRIOR TO EXIT.

Becka fumbled near her throat for a second before her fingers found the key card that hung from the chain around her neck.  The front of the white plastic card shared another photo of her with the blue and red logo of Gotelind Öffentlichkeit Atomenergie AG,  the Berlin-based company that owned the Niedersachsen Nuclear Power Complex.  She slipped the key card into the reader slot to the right of the door.  The slot flared red for a half-second as an optical scanner fired a burst of laser light at the coded security strip on the back of the card.  Electronic locks clanged open, and Becka opened the door and walked through.

If the Reactor Control Room at Niedersachsen had been picked up by a crane, flown half-way around the world, and dropped into the middle of NASA’s Mission Control Center in Houston, Texas ¾ it would have looked perfectly at home.  Three rows of computer terminals and indicator consoles took up most of the floor space.  Cooling fans whispered quietly to themselves.  Hundreds of LED’s flickered on and off in arcane sequences.  Line after line of cryptic-looking alphanumeric data scrolled across green monochrome computer displays.  The air carried the faint ozone smell of electronic circuitry at work.

The focal point of the room was the enunciator board, which covered most of an entire wall.  Three meters high, by five meters wide, it was one of the largest plasma displays in existence.  On it, two-hundred tattletales ¾ each the approximate height and width of a standard construction brick ¾ showed the status of every valve, pump, switch, and relay in the reactor.  The tattletales were color-coded: green for optimal, blue for sub-optimal, yellow for out-of-specifications/requiring-human-attention, and red for critical.

The Reactor Control Officer, Becka Eckhardt, yawned and pushed a strand of blonde hair away from her forehead and tucked it back under the edge of her watch cap.  The white linen cap was silly, as was the starched white lab coat that made up the other piece of the mandatory Control Room uniform.  Control Room personnel could wear any sort of shirts, pants, or shoes they wanted, as long as they wore the lab coat and the watch cap.

As a general rule, Becka wore pleated black slacks with her lab coat, in an ever-more-apparent failure to disguise the extra weight that insisted on collecting around her thighs and hips.  Not that she was overweight, but she was on the wrong side of forty now, and the battle against creeping cellulite was getting fiercer all the time. 

The facility’s Berlin-based parent company, Gotelind Öffentlichkeit Atomenergie AG, didn’t care about her tasteful black slacks, though.  She could have worn hot-pink stretch pants and no one would have said a word.  But let her show up without her cap or lab coat and it would hit the fan.  The company treated the dress-code as a safety issue, as though any stray radiation that might be hovering around would not dare attach itself to a spanking clean cotton smock or cap.

The spanking-clean part would have been stretching it a bit, at least in the case of Erik Lutz, the only other Control Room worker on Becka’s shift.  She stole a glance at him.  His back was to her as he fiddled with a cable that ran from his laptop computer to the Auxiliary Data Logger console.  He was rumpled, as usual.  Not dirty; he certainly kept himself and his clothes clean; he just never bothered to iron anything.  As the Shift Supervisor, she should probably have spoken to him about his appearance, but she really couldn’t see how Erik’s apparent fondness for wrinkled clothes could be any more harmful than the company’s fetish for starched white cotton.

Erik was as tall as Becka was short, and his rumpled dock-sider khakis hid a body that was as lean as hers was plump.  Becka resisted the temptation to stare at his butt while his back was to her.   

She stretched and asked, “what are you playing tonight?”

Erik looked up for a second.  “Nebula Wars,” he said.  “Real-time starship combat simulator.  Wait till I get to the time-jump sequence.  There’s a thirty or forty second animation that will knock you on your ass!”  He went back to fiddling with cables.

That was another thing she probably should have spoken to him about; the regs did not allow employees to plug their personal computers into company hardware.  But Erik claimed that the tiny screen on his laptop gave him a headache.  He loved to jack it in to the big flatscreen plasma display on the Auxiliary Data Logger.  According to him, the flatscreen’s graphics had an in-your-face quality that brought his games to life.  He was constantly saying that he would buy one of his own, just as soon as he could scrape together the money.  Which, considering that the displays each cost about the same as a small car, probably wasn’t going to be any time soon.

“One of these nights, you’re going to crash that system,” Becka said.  “You’re going to corrupt some critical file somewhere, and I’ll end up on the phone all night trying to explain to the Big Bosses how we managed to trip the power grid for half of Lower Saxony.”

Erik shook his head without looking up.  “Not going to happen.  My laptop speaks Windows, and this monster,” he patted the console several times, “speaks ARBIX, which is ¾ more or less ¾ a bastard stepchild of UNIX.  My files and their files don’t mix.  Besides, I’m not saving anything to the system.  I’m just piggy-backing on the video processor for one console.”  He looked up and flashed her a devastating smile, all white teeth and boyish charm.  “And it’s a redundant console at that.”

Becka yawned again and glanced up at the enunciator board for the fiftieth time.  The tattletales were all green.  The plant was cranking out 2,200 Megawatts of power, about eighty-percent of its rated capacity, and all conditions were normal.  No changes.  She didn’t really need to look at the board to know that, because each of the tattletale conditions had an accompanying audio tone to announce changes in status: a pleasant chime for green, a sharp buzz for blue, a warbling alarm for yellow, and a harsh klaxon for red.  The absence of any audio alarms was another indicator that all was well inside the reactor and its ancillary systems.

She could have gotten up and scanned the actual instrument readings on the various consoles, but six months of working with the new software had convinced her that its trend analysis algorithm would spot any shift in readings long before anything drifted out of specifications.  Under ordinary circumstance, that would have been true.

The virus that had infected Erik Lutz’s laptop was not particularly sophisticated, but it was a new strain ¾ so new that there was no entry for it in the laptop’s virus-checker library.  So the virus checker hadn’t spotted it.  Lutz might have spotted it himself, if the virus had generated some sort of error message, or caused a vital function of the computer to fail.  But he was using a Windows operating system, and the virus wasn’t targeted toward Windows.  It was designed to attack UNIX-based operating systems.  It stowed away on the laptop’s hard drive, dormant and virtually invisible, until Lutz jacked his laptop into a system that did operate on UNIX.  And then it went to work.

The programmer of the virus had never heard of Niedersachsen, Germany, much less the nuclear power facility that was based there.  He called his little monster  Freeze Frame, and he had designed it strictly for nuisance value.  Unlike other, more malicious viruses, Freeze Frame did not destroy data, or erase hard drives, or even shut down computer systems.  It was targeted toward the giant building-sized video display screens that were appearing in increasing numbers on the sides of buildings downtown Tokyo.  The idea was to halt the twenty-meter tall video screens in mid-picture, locking in a single image, and reducing the world’s largest televisions to static billboards.

Since the majority of the giant video screens were controlled by Unix-based computers, the virus was programmed to seek out and attack the blocks of Unix code that deciphered and displayed digital video data.  And, when Erik Lutz unleashed the Freeze Frame virus into the Niedersachsen computer system, that’s exactly what it did.

No data was erased.  No damage was done to the computer system’s integrity.  But the giant enunciator board ¾ the Control Room crew’s first and best indication of the status of the reactor ¾ froze.  It didn’t look any different; the green brick-sized tattletales all stayed green.  No alarms sounded.  To outward appearances, nothing had changed at all.

At six minutes before midnight on the eighth of February, at the junction between a capillary feed water pipe and the primary coolant pump, a carbon-vanadium pipe flange developed a leak.  It was a pinhole leak at first, emitting a half-meter long plume of steam that might have appeared harmless to an untrained observer.

Radiac sensors immediately detected an increase in the radiation level within the enclosure that housed the primary cooling loop.  Another set of sensors detected a slight, but measurable, drop in pressure in the primary cooling loop.  Both sets of conditions generated alert functions that were promptly forwarded to the enunciator board in the Reactor Control Room.  A separate set of alert functions were routed through a different set of fiberoptic cables to the instrument readouts on the Shift Supervisor’s console.

For the first five minutes, the problem remained small enough to be handled with a minimum of action.  But the seconds ticked away and no action was taken.  The green tattletales on the enunciator board remained green and silent.  And the green tattletales were so reassuring that neither Becka Eckhardt, nor her shift assistant, Erik Lutz, bothered to check the independent readouts.

The leak in the pipe flange widened, becoming a trickle, and then a pulsing torrent.  The water level in the reactor began to drop, exposing the tops of the fuel rods.  Deprived of some of its cooling water, the reactor core began to heat up.  And still the Control Room crew remained oblivious.

At nine minutes after midnight, the lights in the Control Room flickered.

Becka glanced up at the enunciator board.  “What the hell was that?”

Erik’s eyes joined hers on the display board.  “It kind of looked like that little hiccup we get just before a Stage One Auto-SCRAM.”

Becka shook her head.  “That’s impossible.  The board is clean and green.”

The lights flickered again, followed by an abrupt metallic thump in the distance.

“One Alpha Turbine just tripped,” Erick said.

“No way,” Becka said.  “Look at the board.”

“Forget the board!” Erik shouted.  “Look at this!”  He pointed frantically toward a cluster of readouts on an instrument console.  “Radiation levels in the primary cooling enclosure are at the top end of the safe zone and they’re shooting up like a rocket.”

Becka nearly tripped over her own feet getting to the Supervisor’s Console.  “Shit!” she said.  “Oh God don’t let this be right!  The coolant level in the core is way below minimums.  The core is exposed!”  Her eyes went wide with fear, and for a few seconds, she was utterly paralyzed.  This was not happening.  This could not be happening…

A shudder ran down the length of her body and her knees nearly gave way.  But the paralyzing spell of fear was broken.  She shook her head rapidly and forced her eyes to focus.  The drill.  There was a drill for this.  Just follow the procedures…

“Shut off all the coolant drain valves leading out of the core,” she said.  “It should be V-21, V-48, V-55, and V-119.  But check that last one in the book, I could be wrong about it.  Got that?”

Erik nodded rapidly.

“Good.  Then, divert all three backup feedwater pumps to the core.”  She flipped up a hinged plastic cover and laid her fingers on the wide red button.

The label underneath it read Dringlichkeit SCRAM: Emergency SCRAM.  The word SCRAM was an American acronym, short for Safety Control Rod Axe Man.  Pushing the button would lower all of the Control Rods into the reactor at the same time, dampening the nuclear reaction, and shutting the reactor down.  If she pushed it, she would be ¾ in all probability ¾ ending her career.  Sixteen years of her life down the toilet at the push of a button.

She paused.  Maybe she wouldn’t have to do it.  Maybe she and Erik could get the reactor back under control.  Maybe she could still salvage a few shreds of her professional life.

But what if they couldn’t stabilize the reactor?  How long did they have until the reactor was so far out of control that even SCRAMMING it would not prevent a meltdown?      

“Shit!” Becka shouted.  She punched the button and the reactor SCRAMMED.  LED’s began flashing on nearly every console in the Control Room.  But not on the enunciator board.  The useless tattletales stayed a nice unwavering green.  “Everything is fine,” they seemed to be saying.  “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

“It’s working!” Erick shouted.  “Control rods are down and the core temperature is dropping!”

Becka’s eyes stayed locked on the lying green tattletales as the reactor, and everything she had ever worked for, came grinding to a complete stop.

I’d like to use it as the name of a fictional U.S. Navy destroyer in my latest naval action thriller, Sword of Shiva.  Can’t I just invent a name for the ship?  Of course I can.  I’m a writer.  I make up stuff all the time, and not just names.  I’ve invented countries, weapons, battle tactics, and whole branches of technology.  But I’d rather name the ship after a real person, or – to be exact – a real hero.

I first did this in The Seventh Angel, when I chose the name USS Albert D. Kaplan, for one of the Flight III Arliegh Burke class destroyers in the book.  If you’ve never heard of the real Albert D. Kaplan before, you’re not alone.  He had a long and distinguished career as a naval officer, but my decision to use his name was based on a single event that (as far as I can tell) never made it into the history books.  As the Executive Officer of a Navy vessel during World War II (I believe it was a destroyer escort), he conducted what may have been the only face-to-face shootout in history between a warship and ground force tanks.  Yes, I mean the kind of tanks with treads, heavy armor, and massive guns.

The exact circumstances of the duel escape my memory now, but his younger brother told me all about the incident several years ago, as I was working on The Seventh Angel.  In essence, the Commanding Officer of the ship was incapacitated by serious illness, putting Mr. Kaplan in temporary command.  When his ship was ordered to escort assault boats to a landing beach in Europe, Kaplan suddenly discovered that he was within range of a group of German battle tanks on a hilltop overlooking the beach.  What followed was a slugfest between his ship’s guns, and the turret guns of the German tanks.

Albert Kaplan was not actually the CO at the time, and somehow that caused him to be overlooked when it came time to hand out medals.  His younger brother always felt that — at the very least — the Navy should have named a ship after him.

That never happened.  At least not in real life.  But, at the suggestion of that same younger brother, I named a fictional warship after Albert D. Kaplan in The Seventh Angel.  I did it partly for fun, but mostly because his was an unusual act of heroism that will never be recognized by the formal authorities.

So…  Here I am again, neck deep in another naval action novel, and I suddenly find myself in need of a name for a fictional destroyer.  If you know of some unsung hero and you’d like to suggest their name, please drop me an email or a tweet.  I’d love to have another chance to honor real life hero whose name will probably not ever achieve the fame he or she deserves.

It doesn’t have to be a military hero.  It could be a firefighter, a police officer, a civil engineer, or any person who did the right thing (and the hard thing) while history was looking in the other direction.

I should warn you up front that I’m not exactly sure what will happen to the ship in question.  It may be sunk in a horrific sea battle, or it may do great and cool things, or it may only be mentioned in passing.  As my current story arc goes, the USS Hero’sNameHere will play an extremely minor role in the plot, and may only have the briefest of mentions.  Still, minor plot details have a tendency to seize control of my books, so the ship in question may go on perform great deeds which are not any part of my carefully laid out plans.  I honestly don’t know, so I won’t try to oversell it.  Let’s just assume that the ship will be mentioned in passing, and we’ll find out later if any surprises are in store.

You can email me via the Contact page on this website, or send me a tweet via my nom-de-Twitter @navythriller.  I look forward to hearing from you.

For reasons that now escape me, I went along with this plan until I was about ten.  Then, I finally put my foot down, and refused to continue in the role of servant.  Paul — who had come to think of my coerced labor as his rightful due — saw my sudden refusal as outright mutiny…  an open challenge to his authority.  Thus began a war that raged for a number of years.

Like most young brothers, Paul and I had scuffled periodically pretty much since I learned to walk, but our battles had generally been rare and low-key.  When I refused to resume doing his chores, Paul branded me as his personal enemy.  Hostilities between us intensified, and stayed that way.

We didn’t quarrel; we fought — verbally, physically, psychologically, and in every other manner we could devise.  Paul had two years of growth on me, so I nearly always came out on the short end when our clashes escalated to physical violence.  I say nearly always, as I was not above fighting dirty to compensate for his greater size and strength.  More than once, he won the initial fight by beating the crap out of me, only to have me whack him soundly in the back of the head with a blunt object when his back was turned.  Sorry Mom, but not all of the stitches that went into my dear older brother’s scalp were the result of accidents.

In the terminology of current-day combat tactics, I utilized force multipliers and asymmetric warfare techniques to counter a superior adversary.  Stripped of all the impressive buzz words, I blindsided my loving brother with rocks, broom handles, and once a can of Beefaroni, after he had legitimately defeated me on the field of battle.  I can’t pretend that I’m proud of my underhanded tactics, but my brother did eventually get the message that his ability to inflict pain on me did not guarantee a clean victory.  I could (and would) return the favor.

Needless to say, Mom was not completely oblivious to our brawls.  We were rough-and-tumble kids by nature, and one or the other of us was always getting hurt, so she may not have guessed how many of our respective injuries came from fraternal violence.  But Mom definitely knew that Paul and I were not getting along.

She tried most of the usual methods to smooth the waters between us, but Paul and I were locked in mortal combat, and neither of us was interested in making peace.  Appeals to our reason were no good.  Parental warnings went unheeded, and we ignored threats of disciplinary consequences.  When punishment actually came, it only inflamed the situation, as each of us instantly blamed our sufferings on the other — adding to our mutual hostility.

By the time Mom’s intercessory efforts began, the war had been going on too long for easy or direct solutions.  So my mother eventually resorted to an approach so indirect that Paul and I completely failed to recognize it for what it was.  She bought me a copy of the classic nineteenth-century novel, The Swiss Family Robinson, by Johann David Wyss.

At first glance, this odd little intervention might not seem to qualify as a peace-making tactic, but my mother is a pretty sharp cookie.  She knew that four things would happen after she gave me the book.

#1  I would read it from cover to cover.

#2  Paul would not read it.

#3  I would taunt Paul with nasty little hints about his intellectual shortcomings.  (Mom gave me this novel because she knew that I would understand it.  She gave you a belt, to hold up your pants.)

#4  Paul would badger, cajole, and threaten me until I revealed everything about the contents of the mysterious book.

And that’s exactly how things transpired.  It turns out that Mom has a few psychological warfare tactics of her own.

If you’ve never read The Swiss Family Robinson, you might wonder why she selected that particular book.  I think she chose it because one of the story’s major themes is cooperation between brothers.  When their family becomes shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, the Robinson brothers must work together in order to survive.  Their mutual support ultimately leads to safety and prosperity for their family, and along the way they have the kind of adventures that every boy dreams of.

In hindsight, Mom obviously hoped that her two oldest sons would soak up the message of fraternal collaboration.  I’m sorry to say that her hopes were misplaced.  Paul and I did find something powerful and inspiring in the pages of that old book, but it wasn’t quite what Mom had in mind.  It was the formula for gunpowder.

Not good.  Neither of us were beacons of self-restraint, and any good judgment we may have eventually developed was still years in the future.  With this single discovery, our capacity for wreaking havoc was amplified by several orders of magnitude.  We had acquired the ability to blow stuff up.  Not good at all…

I’m not going to mention the three substances required to produce gunpowder, and I won’t discuss the necessary ratios of the ingredients, or even the simple mixing process.  All of that information is available easily these days, but I don’t want to be responsible for starting anyone down the path of potential destruction that begins with homemade explosives.

When I was a boy, long before the flower of knowledge and communication now known as the internet, the perilous formula for gunpowder was not readily available to the average preadolescent child.  But there I had found it, in the pages of a classic novel, given from the hands of my mother, the would-be peace-maker.

Unfortunately for our neighbors, two of the constituent chemicals were available over the counter at Ekerd Drugs for well under a dollar a pound.  (They even came in white plastic jars that handily matched the necessary proportions.)  The third ingredient was readily at hand in most of the backyards in our neighborhood, and only required a bit of grinding and sifting to achieve the required consistency.

Bang!  The Edwards Brothers Gunpowder Factory was in business.  (And I do mean bang…)

We analyzed our first batch of homebrewed boom powder by igniting small samples on a large sheet of discarded corrugated tin roofing, which served as a combination test platform and fire barrier.  The results were good, and Paul and I quickly made them even better by making minor adjustments to the proportions of the ingredients.  It didn’t take us very long to zero in on what we considered to be the optimal mixture.  Looking back, I don’t know if our recipe was truly optimal.  If we had continued our experiments, we might have gotten even more impressive results.  I don’t know, and I’m not even slightly tempted to find out.

I do know that our final formula was quite dangerous enough.  We were two half-wild boys with a ready supply of gunpowder, and we were not afraid to use it.

We blew up soda cans, detonated plastic models, and tried our hands at building and launching solid-fuel rockets.  We constructed several wooden cannons—bored out with a Black and Decker power drill that was Paul’s prized possession.  Some of the cannons failed; some of them worked, and some exploded violently.  We even tried to fire a billiard ball from a real Civil War cannon in one of the local parks.  That attempt was thwarted by a concrete plug that some safety-minded city engineer had wisely used to block the cannon barrel.

I hate to think what might have happened if we had actually managed to fire that cannon.  At the time, we assumed that our ‘cannon ball’ would travel a few hundred feet and fall safely among the Azalea bushes that lined the park perimeter.  But what if it hadn’t?  When I play the scene through in my head, I see dreadful images of our billiard ball projectile slamming into a passing car during rush hour traffic.

We were lucky.  Any one of our explosive projects could have easily killed us, along with any number of innocent bystanders.  We could have destroyed or damaged major property.  We might have been arrested.  (Probably, we should have been arrested.)  But none of those things ever happened.  We never caused a single injury, either to ourselves, or to anyone else.  We never blew up anything that didn’t belong to us, so our mother was never slapped with a lawsuit that would have bankrupted our struggling family.  Our increasingly violent pyrotechnics did get our family evicted from the apartment complex where we lived, but Mom managed to move us into a big old ramshackle house with plenty of room for our antics, so that wasn’t the disaster that it might have been.

Paul and I were not terrorists.  We weren’t even being deliberately destructive, except when we blew up model ships or fighter jets, to simulate the kinds of explosions we saw in action movies.  Since the models in question belonged to us, we didn’t consider that much of a crime.  We never took any of our explosives projects to school, and we rarely invited anyone else to participate in our activities, so the neighborhood kids were relatively safe.  As I say, we were lucky.

Eventually, our mutual fascination with fiery demolitions faded, and we both moved on to other interests.  It finally occurred to me that something else had faded as well.  The war.  Somewhere in the process of learning to make things that go boom, our own explosions of mutual violence had ceased.  Paul had stopped beating the hell out of me, and I had stopped trying to send him to the Emergency Room in retaliation.

I’m not saying that we were enveloped by a wave of perfect love and harmony.  It didn’t happen that way.  We still argued.  We still needled each other the way that young brothers often do.  Our disagreements occasionally spilled over into physical tussles, but real fights were infrequent, and the deep-seated ferocity was gone.  In teaching ourselves to concoct explosive chemicals and rig hazardous experiments, we had begun to rely on each other.  We had learned to respect one another.

In discovering the secret of gunpowder, we had both gotten our hands on a weapon more deadly than anything either of us had ever touched.  But somehow, we didn’t use our newfound power to attack each other.  Instead, it became a bond that drew us together.

I seriously doubt that Mom predicted our descent into pyrotechnic madness when she handed me that tattered old copy of The Swiss Family Robison.  Even so, Paul and I eventually wound up exactly where she wanted us to be.  I’m not sure if that qualifies as irony, brilliant planning, or simple coincidence.  All I know is that Mom was the only one of us to achieve her final military objective.  I guess that makes her the ultimate victor in my long-running war with my older brother.

Go Mom!  That woman deserves a medal…

In January of 2008, when Iranian gunboats made international news by harassing U.S. Navy warships in the Strait of Hormuz, I got a flood of emails from readers pointing out parallels to the first action scene in Sea of Shadows.  (In print at that time under the title Torpedo.)

In May of 2011, when the German government announced a massive plan to retire every nuclear power plant on German soil, I got a similar spate of emails from readers.  “Hey, didn’t you write about that in Sea of Shadows?”

A few days ago, Der Spiegel published an article about the rapid increase of major armament exports from Germany, including state-of-the art diesel submarines.  So far, only one reader has contacted me to mention the connection to certain elements from Sea of Shadows, but I’ll probably hear from other readers on the subject as the Der Spiegel story percolates through the web.

Am I predicting the future?  Of course not.  The parallels, when they exist at all, are only roughly analogous.  I haven’t ‘predicted’ anything exactly (or even closely), and it seems likely that I never will.  I’m not clairvoyant.  I just look at emerging technologies or geopolitical situations, and try to mentally extrapolate where they might be headed.  If the resulting concepts seem interesting or exciting, I start trying to weave a plot around them, and see where I end up.  Sometimes, my extrapolations are later echoed by real events and sometimes they’re not.  I know there’s no magic to it, and I know that any apparent congruities are purely coincidence.

Even so, the growing list of apparent real world echoes from Sea of Shadows has convinced me of one thing…  I absolutely do not want any of the events in The Seventh Angel to come true.

Not even approximately.

Elizabeth Sawyer first saw the boy on her thirtieth birthday.  After that, she saw him at least once a day.  It took her a week to figure out that no one else could see him.

It seemed like the opening lines to a story, but I had no idea what it was supposed to be about.  I didn’t know anything about this Elizabeth person, or why she might be seeing visions of a strange boy who was invisible to other people.

I tucked the napkin into my pocket, and forgot about it until a couple of months later, when I was asked to teach a writing course to a class of advanced fifth grade students.  I jotted those opening lines on the white board, and had a wonderful discussion with the kids about where the story might be heading.  By the end of the class, we agreed that each of us would take those same opening sentences, and write a story about Elizabeth Sawyer and the mysterious boy.

We decided to collect those stories into an anthology called The Boy, and publish them in paperback.  The kids got pretty excited when they realized that they were about to become published authors, and they had a lot of fun writing and polishing their stories.  Come to think of it, I had a good time working on my own version of the story.

It’s quite unlike anything else I’ve ever written, and I thought it would be fun to post it here.  So without further ado, here is my version of… 

The Boy

Elizabeth Sawyer first saw the boy on her thirtieth birthday.  After that, she saw him at least once a day.  It took her a week to figure out that no one else could see him.

The boy showed up on the trolley, at the grocery store, outside of the office building where Elizabeth worked, and even in a parking garage.  It was the same every time.  The boy would appear without warning, stepping out from behind a bush, or a car, or a sign, or the corner of a building.  He would glance around quickly, make eye contact with Elizabeth for two or three seconds; then he’d step around a corner, or into a shadow, and he’d be gone.

None of her friends or coworkers ever saw the boy, even when Elizabeth tried pointing directly at him.  Could she be imagining him?  Elizabeth didn’t like that idea very much, but she had to admit to herself that the boy might a hallucination.  Could she be losing her mind?  What if the boy wasn’t even real?

The boy certainly looked real enough.  He had black hair, and dark almond-shaped eyes.  Elizabeth thought he might be Asian, but it was difficult to get a good enough look at him to be sure.  He looked to be about eight or nine years old, but he carried himself with a seriousness that made him seem at least two or three years older.  Whenever Elizabeth saw him, he was always dressed in loose-fitting black pants, and a short robe or jacket of gray silk.  Wrapped around his waist was a red sash, knotted in the front, with the ends dangling near his knees.  Like his features, the boy’s clothes looked Asian, but very old-fashioned.  They might have looked at home in a movie about Ancient Japan.

On Saturday afternoon of the second week, he stepped out from behind a rack of magazines in Elizabeth’s favorite bookstore.

Before he could turn to leave, Elizabeth help up a hand.  “Stop!” she said.  It almost came out as a shout.  “I mean, please,” Elizabeth said.  “Don’t go.”

The boy froze in place.  He turned slowly to face Elizabeth.  He watched her without speaking, his face much too serious for a child so young.

Elizabeth felt her cheeks go warm, and she knew that she was blushing.  Now that she had the boy’s attention, she had no idea what to say or do next.

She had never been this close to him before, and she realized that he had an unusual but rather pleasant smell about him: a strange combination of fireworks and cherry blossoms.

She coughed to hide her nervousness, and then blurted out the first thing that popped into her mind.  “What’s your name?”

The boy bowed politely.  “Watashi wa Hiroki desu.”

Elizabeth frowned.  “Excuse me?”

The boy bowed again.  “I am sorry,” he said in English.  “My name is Hiroki.  It means big tree.”

“I see,” said Elizabeth, who didn’t really see at all.

“It is a good name, I think,” Hiroki said proudly  “A wizard’s name.”

That took Elizabeth by surprise.  “A wizard’s name?  Are you a wizard?”

“Hai!” Hiroki said.  “I mean, yes.  I am a wizard.”  He paused.  “Or at least, I will be a wizard, when my grandfather finishes teaching me the Mahou: the way of the magic.”

“I see,” Elizabeth said again.  “My name is Elizabeth.”  She thought about bowing, but decided that she didn’t know how to do it properly.

Hiroki nodded.  “I know your name,” he said.  “I have been watching you.”

It was Elizabeth’s turn to nod.  “I’ve noticed that.”

“I don’t mean to frighten you,” Hiroki said seriously.  “I am looking for Kazumi.  I believe that she will come to you soon.”  He glanced around.  “Perhaps even today.”

“I don’t understand,” Elizabeth said.  “Who is Kazumi?  And why would she be coming to me?”

“Kazumi is a dragon,” Hiroki said.  “Her name means harmony and beauty.”  He nodded gravely.  “That is a good name for a dragon, don’t you think?”

Elizabeth shook her head.  This was getting too weird.

“I don’t believe in dragons,” she said.  “And I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t really believe in wizards either.”

“Ah,” said Hiroki.  “But Kazumi is only a baby dragon.  She’s barely out of the egg, and she is much smaller than an adult.”

He held up an arm and wiggled his fingers.  “She is perhaps the size of your hand.  Just a tiny thing.  Much easier to believe in than a full grown dragon, don’t you agree?”

Elizabeth sighed.  “No.  I don’t agree at all.”

“I don’t believe in any dragons,” she said.  “I don’t believe in little ones, or big ones, or medium-sized ones, or any size, shape, or color.  And I don’t believe in wizards.”

“Then how do explain the footprints?” Hiroki asked.

Elizabeth scratched the back of her head.  “What footprints?”

“The footprints in your butter,” Hiroki said.  “If you don’t believe in dragons, then where do you think the footprints came from?”

“There are no footprints in my butter,” Elizabeth said.

Hiroki smiled.  “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said.  “I’m sure.”

“Have you checked?” Hiroki asked.

Elizabeth opened her mouth to say something, and then stopped.  “What?”

“Have you checked your butter for dragon prints?”

“Of course not,” Elizabeth said.

Hiroki toyed with the red sash around his waist.  “Then how can you be sure they aren’t there?”

“I don’t want to be rude,” Elizabeth said, “but I don’t believe in any of this.”

“That’s okay,” Hiroki said.  “My grandfather doesn’t believe in televisions, or microwave ovens, or skateboards.  And I can’t really blame him.  They don’t leave footprints in the butter, so it’s pretty hard to prove that they exist.”

Elizabeth snorted.  “Okay, that’s quite enough.  You seem like a nice boy, Hiroki, but I’m through with this conversation.  There are no wizards.  There are no dragons, and there are no footprints in my butter.  Zero.  None.  Zip.  Nada.”

Hiroki’s face went completely serious again.  “If you say so,” he said.

He stepped around the magazine rack before Elizabeth could stop him.  She hurried around the rack, no more than a second behind him, but the boy was gone again.

Elizabeth had lost her appetite for reading.  She left the bookstore and headed toward her apartment, walking slowly.  There wouldn’t be footprints in the butter; she was sure of that.

The whole idea was silly; wasn’t it?  There were no such things as dragons.  Everybody knew that.

But where did Hiroki come from?  How did he appear so suddenly?  Where did he disappear to, so quickly and completely?  And why couldn’t any of Elizabeth’s friends see him?  He couldn’t really be a wizard, could he?

Elizabeth reached her apartment at last, and she decided to take the stairs instead of the elevator.  “There are no footprints in the butter,” she said as she reached the top of the staircase.

“There are no footprints in the butter,” she said again as she unlocked the front door of her apartment.

“There are no footprints in the butter,” she repeated as she walked into her neat little kitchen.

She wrapped her fingers around the handle of the refrigerator door.  “There are absolutely, positively no footprints in the butter,” she whispered to herself.

She opened the refrigerator door.

There – neatly outlined in the butter – were a half-dozen tiny little three-toed indentations, as though a creature the size of Elizabeth’s palm had taken a stroll through the butter dish.

Elizabeth closed the door of the refrigerator. “There are footprints in my butter,” she said softly.

Again, she smelled the odd fragrance of fireworks and cherry blossoms.  And that’s when things really started to get weird.

I’m the writer guy.  If you’re not sure what that means, allow me to explain…

Being the writer guy is like being the guy with the truck.  If you’ve ever been the guy with the truck, you know exactly what I’m talking about.  You’re the person everyone calls when they want to move to a new apartment.  Or when they buy a major appliance and can’t afford to shell out the additional cash for delivery.  Or when they need someone to haul 16 pallets of peat moss to revive their dying azaleas.  Owning a truck automatically brands you as the default delivery service for every friend, relative, and distant acquaintance with access to your phone number or email address.  If you’re lucky, they pay you with pizza and beer, and maybe $5.00 to cover the half tank of fuel you burn making 32 round trips to their new dwelling of-choice.

Being the writer guy is sort of like that, except you don’t get the pizza and beer.  Or the $5.00.  When you’re the writer guy, you become the editor and ghostwriter for every neighbor or coworker who needs to string together more than three coherent sentences in written form.

I’ve been asked to look over and critique just about every kind of written material you can imagine, from technical manuals to love letters.  (By the way, the phrase ‘look over and critique’ is code.  It roughly translates as, “please turn my four paragraphs of rambling notes into eight pages of scintillating prose, preferably with footnotes, a bibliography, and a cover page.”)

Over the years, I’ve written (or re-written) a master’s thesis, two doctoral dissertations, four or five major contract proposals, and every kind of report, performance evaluation, and letter of complaint that you can imagine.  I’ve ghostwritten so many term papers that I’m prepared to audit nearly any college course you care to name.  I’ve drafted so many resumes that I could probably get a porcupine hired to work in a balloon factory.  I’ve used the writer mojo to help love struck males woo women I’ve never even met, and — when the letters did the trick — I’ve even helped a few happy couples craft their engagement announcements.

Fiction or nonfiction, official or unofficial, platonic or romantic, I’ve helped people write flyers, posters, newsletters, brochures, school plays, formal grant requests, and children’s books.  So far, no one has asked me to assist with horoscopes, fortune cookies, or pornographic memoirs, but it’s probably only a matter of time.

If there are words to be written, somebody calls me.  I’m the writer guy.  I’m not the only one, thank God.  I have lots of brothers and sisters out there, each doing his or her part to keep the written language alive.  Otherwise, I’d never get around to working on my own stuff.

I know it sounds like I’m complaining, but I’m not.  Oh, I may grumble a bit when you ask me to spruce up your thirty-page report about rodent control in housing developments adjacent to canyons, especially if you attach an unreasonable deadline.  (No hurry.  Anytime this afternoon is fine.)

But the truth is, I like being the writer guy.  I take pleasure in finding new ways to communicate via the written word.  I enjoy the challenge of trying to match the tone of the work to whomever I’m writing on behalf of.  A report by Bill Jenkins should at least sound as though Bill could have written it.  This can be especially entertaining if the supposed author has a vocabulary of fewer than thirty words, but that’s another blog for another day.

Being the writer guy can be time consuming, and sometimes it gets in the way of my personal plans and my professional agenda.  The gig rarely pays off, not even in beer and pizza.  But I can’t stop doing it, because it’s part of who I am.  The sense of satisfaction that comes from cranking out a good piece of writing far outweighs any minor inconveniences, or the impact to my personal schedule.

Unfortunately, I also happen to be the guy with the truck…

#2  There is no such thing as Toaster Barbie.  Any attempt to prove otherwise is dangerous and smelly.

#3  Shatterproof shampoo bottles aren’t.

#4  Those faux-bacon snacks for dogs may smell like bacon, but they do not taste like bacon.

#5  It is not possible to flush a tennis shoe down the toilet.  (But the after effects of the attempt can be interesting.)

#6  Everything (and I do mean everything) tastes better with Ketchup.

#7  Stray dogs (including those with collars and tags) will “follow you home” if you sneak them small scraps of bologna at regular intervals.

#8  Offering someone else a bite of your candy bar is the ultimate expression of love and friendship.

#9  A small boy’s pockets can hold approximately 62 trading cards, 4 dollars in loose change, 3 rocks, a half-eaten pencil, and dozen odd parts from Transformer action figures, but there is no room for candy wrappers.  Small items of trash must always be dealt with by adults, because there is no place to carry them.

#10  The phone numbers 411 and 911 are not interchangeable.

#11  A petrified McDonalds French Fry can cling to the rear seatbelt of a minivan for at least three years.

#12  On the proper settings, an uncovered blender can be used as a sort of liquid cannon.  (Corollary:  The range and trajectory of homemade strawberry smoothie can defy gravity, and the laws of physics.)

#13  The song ‘99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall’ should be banned under the Geneva Convention.

#14  No matter how cold he looks, the cat does not want to wear your pajamas.

#15  It is possible to throw up things that you never even ate.

#16  The performance of Dad’s car will not be improved if you use the garden hose to top off the gas tank while playing service station. 

#17  A toddler with only four teeth can gnaw the corner off of an expensive Ethan Allen coffee table.  This talent is especially entertaining if the coffee table does not belong to you.

#18  With a bit of coaxing, the dog can actually be induced to eat your homework.

#19  Sleep is completely optional.

#20  There are approximately 92 ways to make popcorn in the microwave.  All but six of these will set off the smoke alarms.

#21  Personal hygienic devices and other items of an adult and personal nature can be located during a search for hidden Christmas presents.

Can you tell when someone is up to no good, simply by looking at them?  I can, at least sometimes.

Like most writers, I’m a people-watcher.  I pay attention to what people wear, how they move, their mannerisms, and their facial expressions.  If a particular hairstyle or an article of clothing catches my attention, I make a note of it.  If I see someone display an interesting personal habit, it might end up in one of my novels.  This doesn’t make me an expert in decoding human behavior, but it probably means that I pay more attention to strangers than the average person might.  And every once in a while, it allows me to notice when people are up to no good.   

Let me give you an example…

I go for long walks several times a week, as part of my exercise routine.  I like to switch my walking paths around frequently, but I have a few favorite routes, and one of them happens to follow a sidewalk that passes close to several office buildings.  When the blinds are open, I can see into the ground floor offices, and the office workers can see me.  They often smile and wave when they catch sight of me strolling past.

I have no idea what companies are on the other side of those windows, but they all seem to have positive working environments.  Except for the office on the end.

It probably took me two or three weeks to notice that one of the offices was not like the others.  I didn’t pick up on it immediately, because it doesn’t look any different.  The décor is about the same as all of the other businesses.  The desks are cluttered with family photos, coffee mugs, cute little inspirational placards, and all the usual knick-knacks of cubicle life.  The furniture seems nice enough, and there are colorful calendars and posters on the walls.  But after a number of walks past the building, it gradually dawned on me that something about that one office didn’t feel right.

As soon as the idea rose above the threshold of consciousness, I realized what has been bothering me.  It’s the people.  They never smile.  They don’t wave.  Their shoulders are hunched, and their eyes are downcast.  I never see them chatting between desks, or standing around the coffee pot.  Their body language is depressed and furtive.  It’s like they’re all terrified that someone is going to catch them doing whatever it is that they’re doing. 

Every worker in that office looks like a naughty puppy, waiting to be spanked.  No, it’s worse than that…  They look like they expect the cops to kick in the door any second, and haul them away in handcuffs.

At first, I thought it was my imagination.  It isn’t.  The people in that office are unhappy, and they are ashamed.

A few weeks ago, I decided to cut through the building on the return leg of my walk.  It’s an open architecture complex, with a sort of garden courtyard in the center, and open access at either end.  The front entrance of the unhappy office was easily visible as I breezed through the courtyard.  I spotted the logo on the front door, and jotted down the name of the firm.  I won’t repeat it here, but the company name suggests images of global scope and international vision.  Let’s call them the Questionable Global Corporation.  (Obviously not their real title.) 

When I got back to my computer, I did a quick search for Questionable Global Corporation.  I was curious to see what kind of company might spawn such a dismal internal culture.  Google answered my question immediately.  Questionable Global Corporation is a debt collections agency, specializing in highly aggressive phone and internet-based collection efforts.

I realize that debt collection is a necessary element of our system of commerce.  I am also aware that there are legitimate debt collectors out there, who operate clearly within the boundaries of ethics and the law.  Perhaps Questionable Global Corporation is one of those.  I honestly don’t know, but I have to say that it doesn’t seem likely.  The internet buzz about the company is exceptionally negative.  Even my brief search brought up several thousand references to deception, intimidation, and outright harassment.  Except for corporate PR statements, I didn’t see a single favorable mention of the company.

I haven’t delved very far into this company’s business practices, and I have no intention of doing so.  As I said, I was mostly just curious about the internal culture of this bleak little office.  But it appears that what they are doing is technically legal.  If the web gossip is anything to go by, their operating model may be shady — at least in the humanitarian sense — but it doesn’t look like they’re actually breaking the law.

Even so, it only takes one glance through their office windows to tell that the employees of that company are ashamed of themselves.  I doubt that even one of them is willing to talk about his or her job outside of business hours.  In their hearts, they know that they’re up to no good, even if the law technically condones their actions.

I feel sorry for the people on the other end of the high-pressure scare tactics that the company is known for.  I also feel sorry for the workers themselves.  They might be earning a living, but I suspect that every paycheck is coming at the cost of their personal happiness and self-respect.

The next time I choose that walking route, I think I’ll make an extra effort to smile at the poor worker drones in the offices of Questionable Global Corporation.  Something tells me that they won’t be smiling back.

I hopped off the treadmill, and practically sprinted out of the gym to find a quiet place to answer the phone.  I was expecting to hear a report of death, or at the very least, the black plague.  But despite her long and well-established phone habits, Mom was just calling for a casual chat.

After my heart rate came back down to something approaching normal, we talked for about fifteen minutes, rambling through a dozen odd subjects before we arrived at our favorite topic.  Books.

I got the reading gene from Mom.  Growing up, I could never remember a time when she didn’t have two or three tattered paperbacks crammed into her purse.  Mary Roberts Rinehart, Dorothy Gilman, Ellery Queen, P. G. Wodehouse, Leon Uris, and a thousand others.  She loves books, and she managed to contaminate me with her addiction early in my childhood.  I’ve got it bad…  My personal book collection could easily be mistaken for a medium sized-branch library, and it will only get worse as the years go by.

So Mom and I were yakking away about what we’re reading now, what we just finished reading, and what we’re going to read next when it suddenly hit me.  I didn’t just get the reading gene from my mother.  I got the writing gene from her too.

If you’ve seen me at book signings, or caught one of my radio or television interviews, you know that I generally attribute my love of writing to my father.  He used to make up wild stories about a bear named Oliver, who drank chocolate milk, and went on crazy adventures with a little boy named Charlie.  Dad died when I was seven years old, and I started trying to write down some of his Oliver the Bear stories about a year later.  I’ve always considered that the beginning of my journey as a writer.

But the longer I talked to Mom on the phone the other night, the more I realized that she has been the greatest influence on my desire to write.  I’ve spent so much time focusing on the handful of stories left to me by my long-gone father, that I’ve overlooked my mother’s gifts as a storyteller.  Her stories are funny; they’re scary; they’re heartbreaking, and they’re always fascinating.  When Mom tells a story, you shut up and listen.  You can’t help yourself.  She will enthrall you.

When she tells the story of the automatic transmission problems we had during a vacation trip to Miami, she’ll have you laughing so hard that you’ll be in danger of peeing your pants.  Her ghost stories about Mama Fonnie’s old house in Stillmore, Georgia are positively chilling.  And don’t get her started on the whole thing about taking her towel to belly dance at my school’s PTA.

Mom is so damned good at storytelling, that I’ve never realized just how good she really is.  But her influence doesn’t end there.  She was urging me to write long before I had the courage to set pen to paper.  She encouraged me to take typing in school, because she knew the skill would come in handy when I got serious about writing.

Finances were tight after Dad died, and Mom worked her butt off to keep food on the table.  It was nearly impossible to wheedle money out of her, because there wasn’t much to be had.  Trying to get my mother to advance $2.00 against my allowance was like trying to get God to repeal the law of gravity.  Not happening.  Not no way.  Not no how.  But when I asked for $25.00 to buy a used typewriter, Mom dug the money out of her purse without pausing to think.  I don’t know how she squeezed it out of our pitiful family budget, but she did it.

My mother taught me to love the written word, and to appreciate the wonder and value of books.   She treated me to a lifetime of stories, tall tales, anecdotes, and family legends.  She encouraged me to seek out the training that I would need to polish my craft.  And she believed in me.

I loved my father, and I’ll never forget the stories he told me.  I’m sure that some of it rubbed off on me, and I will forever be grateful for that.  But if there is such a thing as the writing gene, I don’t think I got it from him.  I got it from my mother.

Thanks, Mom.  I forgive you for scaring the crap out of me the other night.  Call again any time.