Jesus H Christ I !@#$ hate Tel Aviv. Mostly because, every time I come here, it's to kill someone. And it's never over anything good and simple.
Tonight's no different. I just did it, in fact. Which means I have about ten seconds to make sure the !@#$ is dead, ten more seconds to sanitize my presence, here, and then less than an hour to get the !@#$ out of the country before someone starts asking questions.
And I owe the pleasure of this little homicidal excursion to one Randolph Scott, boy reporter, who was !@#$ unable to do what I told him. More specifically, what I !@#$ told him not to do.
Namely: do not take our kids to Israel.
Anywhere else would have been fine. South Africa, to see how a formerly segregated society is coming together again and dealing with its problems? Fine. Germany, where their !@#$ up fathers tried to engineer a 1000 year Reich based on forced eugenics, slave labor, and genocide, and no one wants to remember it happening? !@#$ groovy.
Take 'em to North Korea, Myanmar, or Yemen. Have them be rude as !@#$ in Canada, or sell Bibles in Saudi.
!@#$, drop them off in !@#$ Singapore with handfuls of chewing gum for all I care. But not Israel. Anywhere but Israel.
But he didn't listen to me. And now two of our kids are dead because of it.
Why didn't he !@#$ listen? Why?
I mean, you think he'd be smarter than that. You'd think he would know that I occasionally know what the !@#$ I'm talking about. Did he stick metal forks into electrical sockets as a kid, too?
(Come to think of it, that could explain why he's such a bleeding heart. I find that early childhood brain damage accounts for most liberals, anyway. That and too much TV. Or too little.)
So did he think that embarrassing little slip in Libya made us buddies, now? Did he forget that, if he's riding in my car, I'm the one who says when we pull over for a !@#$ break?
There are no words to describe how angry I am, right now. I feel like a parent coming home from a night out and expecting the babysitter to have the kids in bed and be doing her homework, and instead finding the kids in the liquor cabinet, and the sitter upstairs turning tricks in my bed for crack. Except that that would actually be kind of funny, in a "honey, you put the kids in their rooms and call the cops, I'm getting the gun" kind of way.
This? No so much. Not even !@#$ remotely.
You know, when I took Randolph under my wing, back in Antarctica, I really wanted to do right by him. I didn't want him to wind up like the last guy, and be turned some cracked-up version of myself, stumbling through war zones ripped on snake whiskey and wondering if he can get into the press pool with a necklace of human tongues instead of a tie.
But after a while, I realized that's exactly what I was doing. and I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Someone had to look after that last batch of conveyor-belt children that ABWEHR was cranking out for the Fourth Reich. Someone with the kindness, time, and sympathy to help them learn about our world, and how beautiful it is, and how they didn't need to follow through on what the !@#$ up freaks that made them wanted.
And that someone was not !@#$ going to be me. I'd either fold them into The COMPANY, somewhere, or they'd be back at my apartment, ripped on Martian speed, watching Adult Swim, and hallucinating Advanced Supersonic Nazi Hell Reindeer from Below the Hollow Earth. Or trying to sell their stories to get a reality TV show, which could be a million !@#$ times worse.
So I tapped Randolph for the job.
"Show them the world, kid," I said. "Show them the good parts and the bad parts. Show them what we live for, die for, and kill for. Show them !@#$ everything. And I bet your pants-wetting liberal !@#$ editors back at Retardnet will eat it up if you call it an ongoing series."
So he did, and they did, and all was well. Until today.
Today, I'm in the middle of getting reservations for the most !@#$ expensive restaurant on the Eastern seaboard as payback for a certain Director of DAMOCLES for helping us out during the fight with The Skull. And no sooner to do I finally get the person on the line than my phone gets another call, and it's Randolph, and he's crying and scared !@#$less.
"It's Geri and Johan," he says: "They're dead. Someone shot them both at the hotel. They weren't feeling well so we left them and went for dinner, and when we came back...."
"Where are you?" I ask, getting ready to call the Flier, and then remembering it's in the drink halfway between New York and !@#$ Gibraltar.
"Tel Aviv," he says, and starts giving me the name of the nearest street, and the hotel name, and the alleyway he just threw up in, but I stop him.
"Randolph, I'm sorry. I must be hearing things. Did you just say Tel Aviv?"
"Yes, I did," he says.
"And that would be in Israel, right? Not Tel Aviv, Morocco? Brazil? !@#$ Moldavia?"
"Yes..."
At that moment I could have said a lot of things. Really nasty and mean things that would have made his brains blow out of his ears. Literally.
But two of our kids were dead, and he was most likely being hunted, and there was no !@#$ time for any of that !@#$ right then and there. Like a parent who gets a call from a drunk teen at a party they shouldn't have been at, the important thing is that they were at least smart enough to !@#$ call for a ride instead of driving home drunk and wrapping your corvette around a McDonald's.
Death by screaming can take place tomorrow. Save them now.
So I gave him the address of the nearest bolt hole in the Tel Aviv. I could have given him the bigger one, of course, but it was halfway across town, rather than, lucky him, just a few blocks away. I told him the combination for the door, and told him to run there as quick as he could with the kids and lock the !@#$ thing behind him. No exiting, no visitors, no more phone calls to anyone. I'd open it myself when it was safe to come out.
No, no worries. He was safe. I would take care of it. We'll talk about things later.
And then I strapped on by last Man Missile, screaming abuse at every thing in my path (sorry, kitty; sorry, METALMAID) and took off for Tel Aviv as fast as that !@#$ thing would take me. Which probably wasn't fast enough, but thankfully the !@#$ who killed those two were !@#$ stupid.
The whole !@#$ thing is stupid, really. But that's why I told him not to bring those kids to Israel.
Why, you may ask? Other than the obvious fact that someone wanted to kill them all while they were there? Well, let's see if I can explain this and not make you feel as stupid as I'm going to make Randolph feel when I go back on the safehouse door in about ten minutes, maybe about fifty minutes before we all GTFO.
This is Israel. This is the country whose chief intelligence agency, Mossad, is absolutely excellent at hunting down Nazi war criminals and bringing them to justice. This is the country whose Strategic Talents organization, Molchanie, has been working on picking the likes of ABWEHR off, one splattered head at a time, since the state was created.
ABWEHR didn't hole up at Antarctica because they liked making beer out of !@#$ penguins. They hid down there because they knew that, whatever kind of weird, "attack us and we blow up the Earth" detente they had with everyone else, the Israelis were not !@#$ worried about it.
So the last thing in the world that anyone should have done was taken a bunch of kids who were grown in vats by Super Nazis to Israel. At best they'd be arrested, disappeared, and turned inside out on a table, somewhere, to find out how they ticked.
At worst... well, we've seen halfway to worst.
The good news was that the assassin was clean and professional. He slipped into the room, just put two in each of their heads. No torture, no mindgames, just bullets in the brains.
Then he sat there was waited for the others. Luckily, when they came and saw what happened, they started making noise and running away. He didn't want to try and hit them in the street, so he started calling his buddies for backup. Maybe an accident, somewhere?
That was about when Randolph called me, and I told him where to do. They lost sight of Randolph and the others before they ducked into the safe house, thankfully. So all the assassins could do was run around that part of town and try to find them. After all, how far could those kids get?
Wrong !@#$ question. The right one was "How far could I get?" And since I was able to steer the !@#$ thing for once, the right answer was "right up your !@#$ back door after I heard your com chatter, you dumb !@#$."
Yeah, that's why there was that bit on the news about an explosion in Tel Aviv earlier today. I guess some van went boom. They're blaming terrorists, but a little light on the specifics. Gee I !@#$ wonder why.
They're also not saying much of anything about claims that some guy was seen actually !@#$ surfing what might have been a rocket, right into that van. I mean, that's just impossible, right?
And all that nonsense about said person leaping off the !@#$ thing, somersaulting over the fireball, and running away? Call the Weekly World News, amigo. Batboy needs a !@#$ date.
There was, of course, no mention of that person who didn't exist running down some other people who didn't exist, either, and plugging them one by one. Nor was there any hint of anything about a rather vicious showdown between him and the !@#$ who shot those kids, mostly involving the guns in question and his holes at either end.
Not too subtle a message, I figure. But neither Mossad not Molchanie do subtle very well, and they sure don't !@#$ understand it, either. This'll make them understand they crossed a !@#$ line.
As for whether they'll learn anything, well... this is another land that's sadly well-known for generational hatred. "I killed your uncle because he killed my father because he killed your mother because your friends burned down my house because my friends tore down your olive tree because ad !@#$ infinitum," going back several lifetimes and going !@#$ nowhere fast.
So of course they'd kill some kids whose only crime was being born of supposedly-corrupt genetic stock, and whose fathers and mothers killed their kinsmen for something approaching the same reason.
No reason, no rhyme. Just hate, blinding and white like the snows at the !@#$-end of the world that these kids came from.
I told Randolph not to cushion them. I said no sugarcoating reality or history. Show them the best, show them the worst, and hopefully they'll learn to put one over the other, or learn the difference between the two.
And here he did the one thing I told him not to do, and wound up teaching them the harshest, ugliest lesson of all. Some people don't give a !@#$ about what you have to offer, or what you could become, or escaped to get here.
Some people just want you dead because they figure you got bad genes.
Right now I want to just go have a drink, or maybe ten, and steady myself before calling a friend to handle the cleanup, and getting Randolph and the kids the !@#$ out of town. Lebanon sounds nice, right now, and I know a hundred ways to get over the border without being seen. And I'll worry about turning the air blue tomorrow, or maybe the day after that.
I hope they're happy, whoever okayed this hit. I hope they are really !@#$ happy. Because tonight is going to feel like an accidental !@#$slip up the !@#$hole when I'm done with them.
They call this city The Big Orange for some !@#$ reason or another. I'm gonna give it one !@#$ of a squeeze before I go.
(SPYGOD is listening to Israel (Siouxsie and the Banshees, Razormaid remix) and having a Bazelet Double Bock)
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