Clowns to the Left of Me
By: Motsie of Atlantis
Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you
–Stealers Wheel
2014
That’s how they always went in. Deeks, the team clown, was off on Sam’s left side. Callen, whose joking banter sometimes drove him to the brink of wanting to hit him, hard, was off on his right hand side. Of course he should be there, Sam had his back, was his right hand man, protecting his off side just like any partner would do. Sam was always in the middle, ready to go in either direction as needed. And coming up behind, was Kensi, or Nell while Kensi had been gone and even after she returned and still had to prove to Hetty that she was ready to come back to work after Afghanistan. This was the protected position, as the men looked at it, but the men would never say that to those two women. They explained it to the women that they were the only backup for the team. This was their normal way of approach. It was classic. It was safe. It worked.
Why in all the world didn’t they do it that way? It would have taken just a few more minutes to wait for Kensi and Deeks to get there and help them check out the drug sub. Sam could see that Callen was getting impatient. He no longer wanted to wait for the two junior members of the team, who were stuck in traffic or having another one of their arguments about what level “their thing” had gotten to that day, or if it even existed.
By now Callen had climbed up onto the sub and was looking down the conning tower into its bowels. Sam could see the look on his face, the one that said to him, “Come on, let’s do this.”
Sam, the voice of Callen’s conscience, yelled out to him, “G, don’t do it. We gotta wait for backup.”
But Callen, always having the tendency of going lone wolf, had already climbed up on top of the conning tower, looked at his partner and said, “What’s the worst that can happen? We find a couple of drug runners on board, and take them in?” and with his gun drawn, dropped down into the sub.
Sam had to scramble to catch up. It would just be their luck to find the sub occupied, and after a running gun battle in which Callen got shot one more time, he would have to explain to Granger, not Hetty, why he wasn’t there to protect him. Sam knew how Hetty would have acted, but Hetty was not longer there, having been recalled to Washington to give an account of her actions to her bosses. Everyone thought that it was all about the “White Ghost” incident in Afghanistan, but nobody, except maybe Granger, knew for certain. And since Granger had been put in charge of OSP, and Sam had already pissed the man off earlier, he didn’t want to have to go in front of him and explain his actions.
Dropping down into the sub’s control room, Sam was really surprised at how state of the art everything was. This was not something that was just cobbled together by a bunch of drug underlings. As the two agents worked themselves aft, Sam’s feelings about the situation got worse and worse. The sub was packed, not with drugs, but with ammonium nitrate, bags and bags of the stuff. In 1995, terrorists used that fertilizer to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
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