For at least a week journalists wrote stories about the escalating bad relations between China and Russia.  I stilled my pen.  When I gave the matter any thought, I imagined Emperor Xi watching Mike Meyer play Doctor Evil.  If you think about it, Doctor Evil is a good tonic for dictators.  Few of them have a sense of humour.

Consider Putin.  I have it from reliable sources that Putin doesn’t know how to laugh.  Just as some people or tone-deaf, Putin is joke deaf.  His foreign policy expert Laughoff told him the Chinese ambassador was witty.  Putin couldn’t see it.  Laughoff had the wisdom to know better than to try to explain it.  Instead, Laughoff pointed out that the ambassador always got the press laughing during his interviews.  “The press?  An Army of Morons,” muttered Putin.

The Chinese soon announced a series of expulsions of Russian from China.  The Russians opted to make a minimalist expulsion in reply.  Laughoff drew up a list of the 10 homeliest men and women at the Russian embassy to send back to China.  As he told Putin, “it’s a smart move.  These people could procreate in Russia. i assure you it would not be with our country’s best and brightest.”  

Wolverine had managed to reinstate his access at Fort Leonard Wood with the creation of new identities.  All were on TDY to the Fort.  Among the fictive soldiers were SFC Verity, Colonel Doom, and Commander Slackard.  Wolverine was unable to resist a pretext for wearing naval dress blues; hence CDR Slackard.  For a similar reason, he had papers for a USMC LTC that he named Offal.  He said the idea for the name came to him when reading Homer.  

The engineers at Fort Leonard Wood had, per Wolverine, realised a dangerous, perhaps undetectable bomb was on the loose.  Nobody was willing to admit or deny that they knew what the bomb did or how it was hid.  Wolverine did attend a series of briefs by senior engineering intelligence people on possible ways to defeat a wave pattern that might have a role in the bomb’s lethality.  Unlike everybody else, Wolverine knew what that lethality was. It was reassuring that the briefers had no idea how to defeat it, though they had lots of unworkable ideas.

M5 I heard was working hard to place spies on the Munitions Galore payroll.  Peregrine spotted them with ease.  They never had the know-how to tempt him into hiring them.  

Peregrine feared the chief risk to his projects was M5 buying somebody.  So far, he had no evidence of that. 

In hindsight, Wolverine should have kept Uncle Cornpone in his line of sight.  Out of the blue, a trim woman had arrived in Waynesville.  She bought a comfortable house.  She also began to frequent restaurants favoured by Cornpone.  Despite her being a beauty, she flirted with the fat, sloppy Cornpone.  It worked too.  It always does with straight good ole boys.  

When she did talk, she had a gift for getting him to open up about his cop work and his current cases.  Once she got Cornpone on the subject of Wolverine, I gather she picked and picked.  

Cornpone and Lucky Ming were a coincidence of opposites.  Unlike some people, I believe opposites never coincide by accent.  Only art brings them together.   I suggested to Wolverine, who had mentioned Ming’s arrival in Waynesville to me that he use his intel community sources to learn more about Ms Ming. 

Even Wolverine was surprised.  According to his sources, Ms Ming was an alias for an accomplished field operative.  Over her career as an op in Europe and Asia, she had run honeytraps, recruited dupes, obtained what was alleged to be impossible to obtain, and assassinated an indefinite number of people that Emperor Xi had decided the world could do without. 

Wolverine treated her presence with nonchalance.  When I mentioned her to Lord Caligula, he viewed her presence in Missouri as anything but benign.  He sketched his view for me.  

Why would the Chinese waste an operative of “Ming’s” stature in Waynesville?  For anybody well informed and willing to think, Ming’s becoming Cornpone’s boyfriend signaled the Chinese were guessing Wolverine was not a well-connected executive living big but cheap in Missouri.  Rather, Ming’s bosses suspected Wolverine had a role in their NW explosion.  Their suspicions mightily enhanced, on his Lordship’s account, by Wolverine’s position as a Munitions Galore executive well connected to Peregrine and Lord Caligula.  The Chinese planned, his Lordship reasoned, Wolverine’s doings as Ariadne’s Thread to the Ice-10 crowd.  Cornpone was a useful idiot in her hunt.

Summing up, his Lordship remarked, “Now the time has come for Wolverine to be on his toes.”