IS O’NEILL THE REAL DEAL?

Paul O’Neill’s current inside revelations about the Bush White house, and his description of a GWB cabinet meeting as “a clod in a room full of oafs” (yes, I know he didn’t really say that, I paraphrase for effect) is so in tune with the way I have always imagined things, it does give me at least a sliver of hope that we may actually and eventually rid ourselves of the arrogant, corrupt and stupid men who are currently driving the planet to such a Titanic doom.

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A COMMERCIAL

I have a new book out. Or at least the paperback edition of the last hardback. UNDERLAND is now in the stores, although the publishers, Tor/St. Martins are doing their level best to make it a well kept secret. So buy a book, strike a blow, support the scribe. Go to your local fine goth store, or look on Amazon. Underland, the last for the moment of the Victor Renquist stories, is loads of fun being choc fill o’ vampires, the Hollow Earth, Nazis, flying saucers, the NSA, serpent gods, snow, government corruption, alternative history, plus all the usual lurid sex, drugs and violence. (Someone should really make a movie.)

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THE COCAINE SUBMARINE -- A RERUN FOR FUN

I have elsewhere recounted the weird tale from some three or so years ago, about the thing behind the Texaco station in Facatativa, Colombia, but since it was to a limited audience, the retelling would seem like fun. It’s such a piece of urban...or, more precisely, jungle...narco-legend.

When phone taps revealed mention of something big going down in a warehouse behind a Texaco station in the small town of Facatativa, fifty clicks outside Bogota, the Colombian National Police suspected a hoax. As far as the cocaine business was concerned, the place was the back of beyond, but a squad of local cops were dispatched to take a look, and to their amazement they found a mess of highly expensive and highly specialized tools, plus a large metal thing. When experts arrived from the capital, the thing was identified as nothing less that a small submarine, of what appeared to be of former Soviet origin. It had apparently been shipped to Facatativa in bits and was being re-assembled. Locals told of foreigners, apparently Russian, who showed up at the warehouse around sunset, worked all night, and then vanished with the dawn, but the strangers seemed to have stopped coming a few weeks prior to the first police visit. The experts observed that the sub had been modified to give it cargo space with a capacity to haul some two hundred tons of coke, and a unholy alliance between the Colombian drug lords and Russian Mafia was suspected. What the National Police and everyone else were at a loss to explain was how the sub was being put together in a location that was not close to any navigable waterway, and a full two hundred miles, across the Andes, from the Pacific Ocean.