In retrospect, it seemed as though we were always trying to stop soldiers, bosses and under-bosses of one kind or another.
Looking back, I'm not sure if it was because they were a real threat, or because they were the low-hanging fruit for a group like ours.
Figuring out what motivated a dictator was a real challenge: you could plan six ways from Sunday and it never seemed to matter because they were forever throwing out curves.
Mobsters were much easier to figure out: money and status were the pillars upon which they built their organizations and that made them easy to break open.
They may have been turkey shoots in terms of taking them down, but I never liked them. I found it demeaning.
All they would use me for was to be the big slab of beef standing behind one of the "real" agents. I was always holding the door for them. In the day, I could bench four hundred and I had to count myself busy if I got to hold the door.
Barney didn't even need me on most of those jobs.
They would clue me in--often, I thought--just to be polite but when we would get to the floor to do the thing, I would be in the cheapest suit and holding the door.
One time, we got a longer than normal lead time on some off-shore work. We were supposed to break up the slave trade in El Kabar in the Gulf.
Phelps came up with a twist on The Wire and the short of it is that they needed someone in the market to help with the set up.
I get tapped to play the part of a robe seller. I was going to have a stall and about a day to establish my cover. This was going to be my chance and I was going to make full use of it.
I hit the books and learned the idioms of the region. Hired a coach to get the West out of my accent and learned everything there was to know about the native robes.
Those Meisner classes were going to finally pay off. I had a character and a whole biography--one that even explained my larger than average size.
But, in the end, did any of that matter?
No. They changed the play and I was relegated to screening Rollin so he could get under a car to hang a sling.
That was it.
Once Rollin was done, and he certainly took his sweet time doing it, my character was wrapped.
Rest of the job I'm lifting and pushing, pushing and lifting.
I could have done more than they asked. They never asked except to say "Willy could you hand me down the--. I'd get it myself, but I can't quite reach it."
We did a prison job some place in the East, I forget now. Country isn't there anymore. It was another of those escape-proof-prison-holds-high-value-target gigs. There was a time when every backwater country had the ultimate escape-proof prison. We saw a lot of them and broke every one of them.
It wasn't really fair. Someone should have told them that planting the flag, any flag, the most this, the toughest that, the most dangerous something else, was just an open invitation for us to come and take it from them.
Anyway, on this particular job, they sent Barney and me in to open a door. That was it: just open a door so we could make the marks believe that their high value target was just feeding them what we wanted them to know. Phelps' plan was to get them to lose faith in their prisoner and then get them to hand him to us.
Sounded simple, but to make that happen Barney and me had to break out of a cell and make our way across an electrified floor. Some other shit I don't remember now.
We made it out of the cell, no problem and we set up this rig so that we could cross above the electrified floor. It was one of those deals where we had to pull ourselves along hand over hand and then transfer to the top of the cable and then swing back and forth building up momentum so that, when we pushed off, we would land outside of the electrified area.
No big deal, right? This was stuff we covered in Basic. Thing is, Barney was never in the Service.
We must have practiced a week or more just on getting on and off the wire.
Frustrated the hell out of me waiting for him to make it over just once without setting off the alarms.
It wasn't until I actually do it at the gig that I could relax. Up until then I was convinced he and I were going to be cellies until they could trade us out and he and I were relatively low-value assets that we might not ever get traded.
He made it across though. Had trouble sticking the landing almost doing a face-plant on the high voltage floor. Comes my turn, I make it across no problem, do the transfer to the top of the wire and then, just to rub his nose in it a little bit, I take an extra swing before springing off. Stuck the landing with ease and then I make a feint to make him think I am going to fall.
He rushes forward to catch me and I could see his eyes were as big as saucers.
Serves him right.
Later on, much later, after I'd had my sheet cake, I really missed even the pushing and lifting gigs. I found out what an escape-proof prison was really like. By then, there was no one going to come look for me.
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