HALF JACK AND LEPRECHAUN

Corporal Phil
Callaghan smoked an Opus X Petit Lancero cigar as he lay concealed beneath the hedge that surrounded camp commander Kensington’s three story vintage plantation house. Lights out had passed, so except for the trilling of Louisiana bullfrogs and the grunting hack of alligators, the night was still.

Only a few weeks previously, Phil had rushed together a soirée he’d hoped to save for the Holiday 2000 Party later during the coming winter. He had arranged the party instead, as a wild retirement party, for the former CC. Unlike the old CC, the new Camp Commander, Kensington, did not like him. The old CC had chewed his chops and even demoted him once, but Phil was resourceful and people seemed to like him so well, that they were quick to overlook his errors. He mentally replayed his last shenanigan secreting a remote audio/video link into the new CC’s head, and then programming the clip into the base’s computer network screen savers. Officially Corporal Callaghan was a Resource Requisition Specialist, but his hobbies were computers and high tech gadgetry.

Phil emerged and crouched in the liquid darkness that flitted between the stirring leaves of a Pecan tree, adjusted his infrared goggles and listened. His rakish grin vanished. Marching boots that chopped like jack hammers on the sidewalk grew steadily louder. Just great, fumed Phil silently, through clenched teeth, sounds like that big berserker Megadeath, who just shipped in for some “monitored” R & R.

Muscles tense, heart racing, Phil eased back into the concealment of the hedge. He shivered as the coolness of nocturnal autumn seeped into his body. Fresh grass scent from a late season mowing competed with the fragrant tobacco plume that curled from his cigar as he alternately puff sucked and then softly breathed in the night air. Still cupping the air around the red embers of his cigar, Phil breathed a sigh of relief as Megadeath’s footfalls seemed to start sounding farther away. He surveyed the courtyard through his goggles, listened briefly, ground out his cigar, and then scooted out from under the hedge. Several months earlier the sweet shrub Calycanthus floridus would have been clustered with maroon flowers. Phil's quiet brush against it released a faint hint of the strawberry fragrance for which it was well known among professional landscapers. “Good!” he whispered to himself, “Megadeath didn’t spot me.”

Suddenly a hand with the circumference of a dinner plate clamped over his mouth, covering most of his face as well. Abruptly the goggles were removed from Phil’s face and dropped into the grass. “Not!” whispered Megadeath. Following a deep chuckle that sounded like the genesis of an earthquake, the colossal shadow whispered in a gravelly rumble, “Are ya’all the Req Man they call Leprechaun?”

Phil’s worst nightmare was confirmed. The brute strength, Texas drawl, and the muttered profanities that crafted each sentence into vulgarity parsed daisy chains, could mean only one thing: Megadeath.

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