An Uneasy Peace
It was late spring in the little coastal town of Pocasset, MA. Pocasset is located on the “elbow” of Cape Cod, just over the Bourne Bridge over the Cape Cod Canal, and just north of the important seacoast town of Falmouth.
The tourist vacation travel from Boston and New York City to the Cape was in full rush, and I, Dr. Kirby Calloway, Lt. Commander, US Navy Reserve, was glad that my house on Shore Road was well off the main highway, Rte. 28, that led out to Provincetown.
The view out my front door was a green lawn with two tall pine trees, then over Shore Road to the small beach on Hen Cove. Beyond that was the little sand, marsh, and glacial rock island of Bassett’s Island. It sheltered Pocasset Harbor from the swells reaching into Buzzard’s Bay from the cold Atlantic Ocean. There have been persistent rumors of Viking coins and other treasures found in a cave over there, but it’s just a rumor.
I am a middle-aged father of two boys, almost grown into men. I am a graduate of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, and because of lessons learned there, I try to keep myself physically fit and intellectually alert. People say I have a “wry wit,” but all that means is that I feel compelled to see and speak about the events of life, good and bad, through a lens of optimism and humor. We all get the same “four score” years of life, and I think you should prevail against the evil, and laugh with the good. I hope I have imparted that quirk to my sons.
Along the beach, our family sailboat was tied to an aging pier, far out enough to clear the shallows just off the beach. The sky was a pastel blue, with just a few high clouds to filter the sunlight. There was a gusty cool breeze blowing, and when it stopped, the sun warmed up the fragrant pine needles on the ground, wafting their scent into the air. Other than the traffic and few tourists crowding our small beach, and the souvenir stores on Main, it was a nice time to be here.
It was all very pleasant, except for the fact that after a very turbulent last year, to my great sadness, my family seemed to be breaking up. I had recently returned home from my post in Abuja, Nigeria, working for Security Software Inc. with my companion, my lady Claire Montand. I had been overseeing a very large project to construct a nation-wide security software infrastructure for the nation of Nigeria. I was hoping to come home and establish a family routine for the first time in several years, after years of leaving my boys mostly on their own to grow up.
My two sons, Ethan and Morgan, were going their own ways into what would be the next phase of their lives. Ethan is physically a lot like me; kind of rangy with black hair with tints of red, and blue-green eyes. He has the same optimistic outlook and clever wit. He was offered a Presidential Appointment to the Air Force Academy which he has accepted and will soon enter.
Morgan is now a Senior in high school and will be the captain and Quarterback for the Pocasset Pirates in his final year before he chooses a career direction. Morgan looks just what you would expect a high school quarterback to look like; tall, muscular, blond, and very good looking with a great smile. He seems to always be accompanied by pretty girls. He always seems to have a football in hand, tossing it into the air, spinning and catching it. And he has the “Luck of the Irish” from someplace in the Calloway past.
But my experiences in Abuja had triggered several long-term changes in our lives. I have earned the personal ire of an enormously powerful and dangerous man, a Swiss Banker and international financier named Horatio Sorobet.
I had hoped that we could let the whole Sorobet matter pass, because he is untouchable. He is so powerful that I fantasized that the Calloway family was just an irritant, and he would move on to his next evil scheme. But, I fully expect further retaliation attempts from him. The score is in the Calloway favor at this point, and Sorobet is not going to let that stand. After all, we did disrupt...no, we frigging destroyed his $100 million-dollar human-sex trafficking ring, and either killed or imprisoned many of his associates. I heard an unconfirmed report that the hitman he sent to kill the boys at the end of the last episode in this story was his nephew, and my sons left him bloody and dead in the streets of Pocasset, MA. with three .556 slugs in or through his body. That was probably not the way he expected to die, and his uncle is no doubt highly displeased. But maybe he has had enough of the Calloway family and our friends. But I doubt it.
My love, Claire Montand, who I had met in Paris, was with me all through the battle of Castle Calloway, my home in Abuja. Fifty or more soldiers from General Kwandanbo’s rag-tag rebel army attacked us there, but we were able to defeat them with help from my friend President Muhammad Muhari Clarion’s Navy Marines. Two of them got in through a broken window and attacked Claire in her bedroom, so she shot them both dead. We have never talked about her feelings about her brush with death. I fear she is still terrified deep inside.
After all this, it was time to leave the country quickly as I had made enemies of the Chinese, the Russians, and the remnants of Kwandanbo’s army, as well as our own CIA, or at least a part of it. Now we are all at home in Calloway Court, Pocasset, Massachusetts.
Now I need time to put my family back together in this house if I can, and get to know my sons who have grown up without me. I wanted to be their father and experience their personalities and their love. But, in a familiar pattern for the Calloway family, this was going to be very hard for me to do.
