Tired Gun
“Let’s assume I get struck by lightning and I
end up in the
U.S. Senate. I’m there for six years. What’s the
worst thing that could happen to me? I serve out my six years
and I come back … and I write a book about it.
And the book will sell!”
—Tom Clancy, in The Washington Post Magazine
Senator Jack Ryan stared at the papers on his desk. They were from the Government Printing Office, on North Capitol Street, between G and H Streets, and bore the characteristic “eagle” watermark. Ryan decided that the eagle was more like a turkey these days. This document made Ryan’s stomach juices churn, and he yearned for a cigarette, but the pantywaists who made the laws had outlawed smoking, along with school prayer, so he would have to wait until he got to the cloakroom, where he liked to blow smoke in the faces of the women senators. Ryan liked women. His mother was a woman, and his wife was one, too, but it was madness that they were allowed to serve in combat or in the Senate.
The document was a second-degree amendment to a first-degree amendment closing the last military base in the United States. It mandated the confiscation of every last one of the two hundred million privately owned guns in the United States, even assault weapons used for shooting deer. He had filibustered against it for seventy-six hours. He was tired. He thought of Vietnam. Not that he had ever been to Vietnam, but he knew lots of people who had. Now another battle loomed, and Ryan had to summon every joule of energy in his weary musculature if it was to be won.
He cleared his throat and shouted, “Mr. President!”
All heads turned. A murmur of groans went up in the chamber. He was used to it. Ryan had been a thorn in their side for the past six years, and they could not wait for him to retire at the end of this term. He was not seeking reelection. He was going to become a novelist and write manly sagas about big guns that could vaporize the human heart in milliseconds. Who needed this?
“Chair recognizes the gentleman from Maryland,” said the president of the Senate, who, according to the Constitution, was also the Vice President of the United States. He was a tree-hugging liberal who had smoked pot in his youth, but he had gone to Vietnam, so Ryan hated him a little less than he hated the others.
“I move for a quorum call,” Ryan said. More groans.
“With respect to the distinguished gentleman,” Senator Joe (Stalin) Biden, of Delaware, one of the most liberal men ever to sit in the United States Senate, said. He had had a hair transplant. Ryan had information from sources deep within the National Security Agency that the Soviets had implanted a microchip in Biden’s skull while he was having the hair plugs put in, and so could now control virtually every piece of legislation that went through the Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees. It didn’t matter that the Soviet Union was now defunct, its heirs rattling the tin cup. Ryan knew that the Bear would be back. “Can we please just get on with it?” Biden said.
Ten more seconds. If only Ryan could hold on. He stood up again. “Mr. President, I move for a brief recess.”
Still more groans. What did they know of stamina, these people who had never met a payroll, or written fat beach books about expensive weapons systems that worked 100 percent of the time?
Eight seconds … seven seconds …
Suddenly, men in cool black uniforms, with blackened faces, carrying CAR-15s, M16s with M203 grenade launchers, and Belgian-made SAWs, swarmed into the Senate. It was the Army’s elite Ninja Seven company, a group of such efficient, highly trained killers that they scared even Ryan, and, Lord knows, he did not scare easily. They shot every liberal-wimp member of the Senate. When it was over, only Ryan and a handful of senators remained.
“Sometimes democracy is messy,” Ryan said as he opened his desk and removed a Heckler & Koch MP-5 SD2 submachine gun, and administered the coup de grace with a few crisp bursts into a heap of twitching bodies. “But it’s still the best system we’ve got.”
—The New Yorker, 1993