Dark Ages

A quarter mile later it was about to rear-end the Hercules, but the airplane lowered its ramp. The SUV accelerated, then drifted up the ramp and disappeared inside the aircraft. The Herc accelerated and lifted off.

The waitress watched it vanish, which didn’t take long in the dark of night, then she turned and stared at something far down the highway. It was a woman, running wearily to the truck stop.

“Are you hurt? Were you raped?” the waitress shouted as she followed the haggard jogger into the restaurant

“Would you shut up? I’m fine. I’m gonna use your phone.” The jogger barked some sort of code words into the telephone, then turned on the twins. In minutes, the sky filled with helicopters. Unmarked cars arrived next. The state police came last demanding explanations.

“Got away?” shrieked the woman who had jogged to the truck stop. She was getting some sort of update on a- walkie-talkie. “It’s a freaking flying football field! Half the state must have seen it!”

“Running dark,” pointed out the brother with the mustache.

“Above the cloud cover, and it’ll cushion the sound,” his brother explained.

“Shut up!”

The brothers were questioned. They told the same story as the waitress, and when they asked to see the Feds’ badges they were rebuffed. They helped themselves to more coffee. The woman jogger asked them one last time, “You sure you didn’t get the numbers off that aircraft?”

“’Course we didn’t. It was running dark.”

“Goes without saying.”

Chapter 3

There were no sacred cows left. Even the highest of all honors had become polluted with the political realities of the modem age. These days the monarchy was symbolic, and when the British crown bestowed the honor of knighthood it wasn’t necessarily to recognize great accomplishment. Sometimes it was, quite simply, politically expedient.

It all started with a zealous reporter on the local paper. He needed a story and there was no news to be found, so he scrounged some up. There are always problems, he was known to say, that have yet to be brought to the attention of the people,

This problem wasn’t likely to stir the masses, but it filled half a front page. Newfoundland Is Knightless! the headline screamed.

It reported that not one citizen of the Canadian province of Newfoundland had received knighthood in a decade. The queen had knighted a few citizens of Ontario, a couple of English-speaking Quebecers and a handful of Albertans and British Columbians. There was even a man from the Yukon who received a knighthood a few years back for rescuing a Royal Navy ship from pack ice.

“Why have the good people of Newfoundland received no such honor?” the paper asked.

“Why No Newfie Knights?” asked the TV promos when the Newfoundland news programs latched on to the scandal.

A marine environmental study was released the next day, and anything that concerned fishing was real news. The business about the knights was forgotten, but the PR strategists for the royal family had noticed the uproar.

“We need to act now,” explained the royal administrator of Her Majesty’s public relations. “The next time the story surfaces it could create ill will.”

So they tossed a knighthood at the first semiqualified candidate from Newfoundland. Good public relations were ninety percent forward thinking, after all.

To be fair to the royal administrator of Her Majesty’s public relations, he couldn’t possibly have foreseen the disaster that resulted from bestowing knighthood on Regeddo Tulient.

Her Majesty’s army of honor arrived at the Confederation Building in St. John’s, Newfoundland, in a fleet of taxis, then gathered in formation on the front steps.

Regeddo Tulient circled to the head of the formation and looked around.

“Take control, Sir Tulient,” barked the voice in his ear.

“I don’t know if they’ll even listen to me,” Tulient whined.

“They’re paid to listen. You’re their boss. Start acting like it.”

Tulient wasn’t sure he was cut out for this. He didn’t like telling people what to do. He wasn’t a people person. He was an archaeologist. Not even a good one. He had happened to discover, through no fault of his own, the remnants of the earliest Viking settlement in Newfoundland. To his astonishment and embarrassment, they knighted him for it.

“I don’t think I deserve it,” he confided to Her Majesty’s representative.”

“You made a great find that proved the English were on this soil a thousand years ago. It’s a monumental discovery.”