Charlie’s Apprentice

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This title was more pompous than most – today’s Foreign Office offering was ‘The New Reality of the Future’ – but the contents were the same, just reconstituted and served up differently: mincemeat from previously left-over scraps.

Charlie Muffin preferred his own title. Bullshit. Which was how he’d judged every other analysis and thesis interpreting the dissolution of the Soviet Union into its uncertain Commonwealth of suspicious republics which was supposed to lead to a New World Order. All bullshit. He’d said it, too, although in language more acceptable to civil servants in the response arguments he’d had to make, to every woolly-minded exposition. He’d say it again, of course, about this effort. And be ignored, as he appeared permanently to be ignored these days.

Charlie sat in his favourite launch position, chair tilted back, legs splayed over withdrawn bottom drawers to support awkward feet, the waste basket propped in the far corner of his rabbit hutch office. He sighted, minutely adjusted the trajectory, and fired the dart carefully crafted from the last page of what he’d just read. Lift-off looked good, all systems go, but then abruptly the missile dipped, early impetus gone, to crash among the other failures already littering the heel-chipped floor largely uncovered by the minimal square of frayed, Ministry grade III carpet. It put the final score at three in, seven out. Bad. Or was it? On the recognized scale for intelligence operations three out of ten was a bloody good success rate: remarkable even, considering the cock-ups that inevitably occurred along the way and usually, and more importantly, to him. But then he wasn’t assessing an intelligence operation.

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