Dear Crew of the USS Tom Clancy, Happy Martin Luther King Jr Day.

This is the third chapter of a serialized novel for paid subscribers. The first chapter is here:

The second chapter is here: CHAPTER III: FORMER ACTION GUYS—FIREFLY• • They farmed wheat, mostly, at least in the spots you could move a combine across the hilly ground; although quite a few of the people up in these valleys took to farming the government too, enrolling their land in the CRP and securing payments per acre every year, as opposed to only being able to grow wheat—prices varied so much year to year some years could make a boom some years could make a bust. Wasn’t much margin up here. Better to get that steady paycheck from Uncle sometimes. When they did farm it, unlike the snake river Morrison Knudsen irrigated bottom land, they dry farmed it. There was a trick to the seeding of winter wheat — you wanted to plant in dust, and then you prayed it didn’t rain until the first green stalk poked thru the tan ground. Then you prayed for rain. If it rained while the seed was still growing in the ground, it would get the top inch or two of the soil wet, and then the hard crusty creme brûlée top would block the seeds from poking through. People lost whole crops that way. It wasn’t like seed, and machinery, and labor, and land, was cheap. That was why there was crop insurance. FIREFLY’S Grandfather told him all this, taking him on chores all over the farm, a beer can in hand. He drank Olympia, mostly, but the rule was warm beer in the summer cold beer in the winter. It’d been welded to his hand — or to the coffee cans he’d drilled holes into and fastened to every tractor, combine, thresher and anything else with wheels and tracks he used to move around the farm. To Read “EASY MONEY” or any of the other artisanal hand-crafted symbolic arrangements in the Hunt for Tom Clancy, please become a paid subscriber and also tell your friends to become paid subscribers FIREFLY’S GRANDFATHER was a ball-turret gunner on a B-24 in Europe. He kept a couple pictures up still at the house, and FIREFLY studied them intently as a young child. The plane carried the name Witchcraft along with a hot pinup painting of a proto-Elvira babe suggestively stroking a bomb.

          Read more
       (https://thehuntfortomclancy.substack.com/p/easy-money-chapter-iii)