The Moosehead Stratagem Chapter 4, Part One

[Thank you for another hundred follows.  My gift to you is the next and last of my chapters of The Moosehead Stratagem.  A parody of Robert Ludlum novels.  I hope you enjoy it.  You can find the previous chapters here]

 

Four score and gobble gobble seven gobble years gobble gobble gobble gobble…

A Man Reciting the Gettysburg Address While Being Transformed into a Turkey, 1946

Resnick Tucker Resnick surveyed the field of bodies on the roof of the apartment building. Sloppy, he said to himself, Very sloppy.

Whoever sent the ninjas forgot that their main weakness is the baboon, specifically the Hamadryas Baboon. A smart operator would’ve sent a few leopards along with the ninjas just in case. Stupid amateurs! The scene was ugly…scalp bites, limbs torn or cut off…Resnick lit a cigarette, then spit it out when he realized that he didn’t smoke. He scanned the bodies until he saw movement, then he grabbed the combatant and pulled his face up to his.

“Where’s Wistershenshenham and the girl?”, he asked with poison in his voice. The unfortunate baboon could only answer with anguished grunts and a few words that he had picked up from a Lyndon LaRouche pamphlet he had taken from a volunteer at the subway. As the animal died in Resnick’s arms, he scanned for a more human survivor. A ninja was trying in vain to crawl to the fire escape. Resnick ran to him and started questioning.

“Where’s Mike Wistershenshenham?”, he demanded softly. The ninja scoffed at him in Japanese, laughed at him in Korean and commiserated with him in Farsi. Resnick contemplated his next move. Torture would be useless against a ninja. They are as resistant to pain as a marshmallow to a lawsuit. But, Resnick knew the weaknesses of the ninja. He knew something that they hadn’t trained against. Boredom!

“My grandmother”, he began, “Was Irish…or great grandmother…I don’t know for sure—but, she came over between the potato famine and Linus Pauling’s Nobel Prize. She came from Londonderry, a county in Ulster…from a town called Dunngiven or some such. She had a dog named ‘Biscuit’ which she named because the dog was frightened by a biscuit once…or appeared to be—it never happened again, but one time was enough for my grandmother…or great grandmother…or Linus Pauling for that matter. The dog liked to lie in the road until a car came along; then, he would move out of the road until the car had passed. Mostly he just ate, drank and slept, although one day he found a mole and ate half of it. My grandmother would feed him bones and milk and bread, but the other scraps she gave to her cat, which was entirely white except for the brown, black and grey spots all over it. She called the cat ‘Biscuit’ as well because she was once frightened by the dog, although they eventually made peace with one another and she slept in the tree while the dog slept in the road. My grandfather—or great grandfather…or Linus Pauling slept on the couch. It was a quiet house and nothing ever happened there except for one day when my grandmother—or great grandmother spilled ant powder all over her hamper…or maybe it was all over Linus Pauling—“

“I’ll talk”, the ninja hissed, “What do you want to know?”

“Ah”, said Resnick Tucker Resnick, “You speak English”

“I forced myself to learn it just now so that I could get you to shut up”

“Well”, replied Resnick, “Just tell me where Wistershenshenham and the girl are”

“I…can’t!”

Resnick took a deep breath. “My grandmother…or great grandmother, used to sing me a song at bedtime about Linus Pauling—“

“Okay, okay!”, the ninja pointed to the elevator shaft, “They went…down…there” The Asian man in black fell backwards, never to speak again because he had been jinxed and he could get no one to say his name.

Resnick lost interest in his captive immediately and trotted to the elevator shaft. It was dark and deep; in fact, he hadn’t seen a shaft that deep since Samuel L. Jackson portrayed him in the year 2000. He pulled a flashlight from his pocket. A grating had been cut away—Wistershenshenham and the girl could still be in the building. He started to jump to the cables so that he could slide down to their escape route; however, the cables jumped to life as the elevator started rising. Probably the police…

Resnick contemplated masquerading as a cop to get more information, but he’d probably get discovered. Instead, he would make himself invisible to the men while they investigate the crime. Invisible in plain sight. He grabbed a body and pulled at the fabric. Out fell poison needles, darts, explosives, a lemon and a can of frosting for a German chocolate cake. As always, he had a plan. Think two moves ahead, like a game of chess.

He felt the jab of a narcotic dart piercing his skin. It wasn’t a big deal. He had trained himself to fight the strongest narcotics. He put on the ninja uniform and lay down with the rest, thinking to himself…

Mike Wistensham…the only force is had you sleep, he managed to utter to himself before he passed out in the lice-ridden mane of a dead baboon…