Think Like Them

111.

“I am tilting back for forty,” I announce, “wake me if anything changes.” 

Drysdale looks at me with sympathetic but questioning eyes, the left full of empathy and the right loaded with paradox, blinking with an ‘everything is always changing’ strobe. Seeing this, I add the detail, “Should they change course or initiate descent.”

I reach for the seat lever and recline. My head is throbbing. I massage temples tender with stress and gently rub my eyes. I breathe as deeply as the compressed air of the cabin will allow and relax. On cue my mind takes the bait like a hungry tuna, “Is Violet, Maria, Her Majesty, now a hostage?”,“With a five grand range, where, exactly is the MBI jet heading?”,”What is the master plan?”, and perhaps most critically, “What move can we make to impede their progress, or terminate the plot, the cell, the terror altogether?” Like shuffling a tarot deck I pick a card and consider its symbolism and divination. From an unknown location deep in my psyche I hear the echoed refrain of a long dormant verse. “Think like them.”

Think Like Them. I once used this plea with TOM as we debated the tactical advantages potentially achievable if a particularly risky move was put into play. TOM wanted to take the safe approach but I argued that we were running out of time and if dangerous measures were not immediately ordered, we might lose a major battle. TOM asked what provided me with the conviction of my opinions, what specific bit of experience, training or intel led me to this radical belief. 

“Because I know how they think,” was the tarot.

This is a whole new set of circumstances, an entirely novel situation, but armed with volumes of case histories; the colossal terrorist success like hijacking aircraft to kamikaze skyscrapers in New York and fly simultaneously into the Pentagon and White House, the Oklahoma City fertilizer bombs, or even now the regular school massacres, widely considered as unfortunate collateral damage by conservative Republicans, to the countless failures, many of which we have played a peacekeeping part, all have similarities and tendencies that we can use in our relentless counters to their devious planning. 

“If I am Big, what is my current motivation?”

I consider the possibilities, especially the one where I, thinking like Big, have a new tool with which to further twist the plot. The Queen is a windfall stroke of luck, from this perspective, capable of adding another, completely new, inventive, and therefore dangerous, level of acumen to the contest, one that by all indications is already firing on seven of eight cylinders. 

“I would put her in play, allow her commitment to manifest as further proof that karma takes time to catch up with reality, that the hour is now and the place is ….. Where?” 

Drysdale taps me gently on the shoulder. 

“They appear to have begun initial descending protocols.”