Wick the Boot doesn't wear boots. It's a funny thing: he doesn't touch the ground. Hasn't in years. It's a kind of little superstition with him. If he touches the ground, he dies. Not really. He knows it isn't true, like the little boy who knows that stepping on a crack won't break his mother's back, but avoids stepping on cracks anyway. It's a kind of just-for-good-measure measure.

He doesn't touch clean floors either. Any flat earth-like surface. He is a creature of the air. He flies wherever he goes, except across the room: then he's carried by Chechen slaves. They airlift him to the toilet, hold up his feet while he shits and doesn't stink. Here in his Moscow lair, Wick the Boot aka Wikvaya Boutte aka Widad Boutros aka Viktor Bout (the name on his passport) can relax as the god W, whose shit doesn't stink.

It's no coincidence that his cover identity in the earth-bound world is air charter service owner. Even on earth he is above the earth. He runs a network of cargo planes flying sensitive goods around the globe. Weapons and drugs, mostly. Drugs to get you high, weapons to blow you sky high. It pleases him to airlift flying machines into a country at war, spy planes, helicopter gunships. But he has also flown flowers and exotic fish.

These days, in Iraq, it's water. Bottled water. The American troops drink a lot of water, and won't touch the local stuff, which is brown and full of parasites. They were bringing the water in on trucks, at first, but the insurgents took so many trucks out with IEDs--improvised explosive devices, which Wick has not yet found a way to supply--that they took to the air, hired him. He's made millions off the Americans, millions more, of course, off the Iraqi insurgents, and off the Taliban before them, but it's not about the money, for him. It's the flying. He doesn't do it himself, of course. But he loves the mental image of his sixty planes in the air, circumnavigating the globe.

A slave brings one of his generals in, Vitya. Viktor Lebedev, whose last name means "swan." All his generals have v or w first names and flight-related surnames. Not that swans ever fly--a black mark against Vitya right there. Wick's had his eye on him for months, now, waiting for him to fuck up.

"We got problems, W," Vitya says.

"I pay you to handle problems," Wick says.

"And I handle this one," Vitya says. "But I want to tell you."

"Tell," Wick says.

"Bill Kaul got loose from Americans," Vitya says.

"Is impossible," Wick says. "He is jpeg. Digital image does not escape containment facility."

"Ambassador says he emails himself out of there," Vitya says. "As attachment."

"Emails himself where?" Wick says.

"We think here," Vitya says.

"Here?" Wick says, sitting up in bed. He points to his lap. "Here?"

"Not here here," Vitya says. "To dream of Doug Robinson. Ambassador fears creation of new Mullah Billdoug."

"Is impossible," Wick says. "Doug Robinson locked in dream-proof cell. No dream can get out, no jpeg can get in." He eyes Vitya suspiciously. "You checked cell, yes?"

"Absolutely, W," Vitya says. "Doug Robinson sleeps and dreams. But no dream leakage through seal. Sensors would have picked up."

"And contents of dream?"

"Whales."

"Whales?" Wick says. "Fish whales?"

"Mammals," Vitya says.

"I kill you," Wick says.

"Sorry, W," Vitya says.

"No Bill Kaul in dreams?"

"No whiff of Bill Kaul in dreams," Vitya says.

Then he knows. He knows how it went down. Computer hackers. Someone has been feeding his system disinformation, to lull him into a false sense of security. There is no whale! What there is is a new Mullah Billdoug, or possibly Dougbill, which, as his mother told him back when he was but a godling, is twice as dangerous.

He gropes under his pillow for his gun, pulls it out and shoots Vitya. The gun doesn't fire. He pulls the trigger again: click.

"Why this gun doesn't fire?" he says impatiently.

Vitya reaches a trembling hand over, undoes the safety. "May I ask why you kill me?" he says shakily.

"Because you fuck up, you swan!" Wick yells, and blows Vitya's brains out. "Slaves!"

The slaves come running.

# posted by Doug Robinson @ 7:37 AM

I think I've been dreaming, which is strange, because I don't usually fall asleep at the computer. I was dreaming I was in the belly of Jonah's whale, of all places. Jonah was there too. And he had--a laptop, I think. He was blogging from the belly of the whale. And somehow there was a yellow cab in the whale's belly with us, and Doug was there, or I was Doug, or something. And I think I sat down on the packing crate Jonah had left his laptop on, lifted the computer onto my knees, and typed in http://warincontext.org/, and suddenly--I wake up here at my computer, at home in New Mexico. And I can hear my wife Svetlana in the bathroom next door, singing some Russian song in her weird little offkey voice.

No, wait--my wife is Susan, and she should be back home in Oxford, Mississippi. Or could she be at work? Then who is that woman singing offkey in Russian?

I get up, tiptoe to the door. For some reason I'm trembling like a son of a bitch. What am I afraid of?

I peer around into the bathroom. Imagine my surprise when the woman standing there in her bra and panties, splashing warm water on her underarms and singing that strange little melody in Russian, is Joseph Stalin.

He turns and sees me, and my blood runs cold. I have time to notice that the swells of his breasts above the Lycra look real. Hormonal treatment? Then he cocks his ear, holds up one hand, and as the screaming of the missile penetrates my mortal hearing too he yells something in Georgian-accented Russian that sounds like "GET DOWN!"

# posted by Doug Robinson @ 11:43 AM

I must take exception to your casual slur on the many upstanding members of my species in your post yesterday. If you mean to imply that all red herrings are somehow involved in misdirection and deceit, why, you've got a lot to learn, is all's I've got to say about that.

Sure, we've had our share of bottom-feeders. Old Red Joe had his fling with communism, back in the forties. But so what? It was a common enough heresy, back then, before we knew about Stalin and the labor camps. Boo-Red got into that spot of trouble with a guppy, a glow-worm, and a bottle of mercurochrome. His wife never forgave him for that, but their marital troubles should be of no concern to your readers! And I'm here to tell you that the "scandal" everybody was talking about a few years ago involving me and an emperor plecostomus was blown way out of proportion by the media. He and I are just good friends. There was never anything "funny" between us. We have too much respect for each other, and ourselves, to get involved in anything dirty and disgusting like what the papers were reporting.

But none of this has the slightest bearing on the fact that herrings of all shapes, sizes, and colors are good red-state citizens and loyal bug-loving Republicans. We are not deceivers. We are not liars. We are not blogless communists helping you and your kind escape from the Wrath of Blog. All my relatives and I, and lots of other good red-state mackerels, tunas, and sprats as well, will thank you to keep us out of your liberal blue-state machinations from here on out.

Sincerely,
Red Herring

# posted by Doug Robinson @ 1:06 PM

"So, uh, Jonah," I say. "Tell me: where are we going?"

"What do you mean, 'going'?" Jonah says vaguely.

"What do you mean, 'what do you mean'?" I say. "I mean, where are we going?"

"We're not 'going' anywhere," Jonah says, as if to a precocious but overimaginative 13-year-old. "This is a virtual whale. Get it? It doesn't exist in clock-time or yardstick-space. There's no 'where' to go to."

"Uh huh," I say. "Sure."

"What?" Jonah says. But his tone is off. There's something he's not telling us.

"Do you guys still need me?" Bill says. "Cause, you know, I've got some emails to--"

"Go," I say, rolling my eyes. Bill goes. Jonah and I both watch him waddle back to the blog.

"Nice guy," Jonah says. He despises Bill. I can tell.

"We're going to Iraq, aren't we?" I say.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Jonah says, busying himself with his laptop.

"Oh yes you do," I say. "You know exactly what I'm talking about. You're hiding in that laptop so I won't see your complicity in this whole red-herring Iraq War in your eyes, you big faker."

"You're crazy," Jonah says suddenly, glaring up at me with a strange mix of fear and resentment. "Who sent you here? What are you trying to do to us?"

"'Us'?" I say.

"Abraham Lincoln sent you, didn't he? I knew that old quack couldn't stay out of world politics for more than a month at a time."

"Abraham Lincoln," I say stiffly, my voice sounding pompous even in my own ears, "is a great man, and I had the tremendous honor of serving him in the White House this time around. But I haven't spoken--"

"Spare me the histrionics," he sneers. "You fish-lovers make me puke. Where is he? Is he in the trunk?"

"I don't," I start, but Jonah is already in motion. He grabs some sort of prybar from the debris and takes it over to the blog, pops open the trunk.

"See?" I say. "Nothing."

"Oh ho ho," he says, reaching far into a back corner and pulling out a piece of paper. "Looky what we have here."

I come over to see what he's found. "So?" I say. "It's a movie poster. Big deal."

"It's a movie poster for Beyond the Sea," Jonah says significantly. "Now do you want to tell me who sent you?"

He holds out the poster. For a moment I think he's handing it to me, but his arm is out at an angle away from me. Then, out of nowhere, thousands of cockroaches swarm up his legs and torso, flood out his arm, grab the poster, and make off with it, clicking and chittering.

# posted by Doug Robinson @ 7:44 AM