November's eyes had the look of a predator calmly watching a distant prey,December was defenitely crosseyed and January, it had turned malevolent green.
Lambertin was now firing , salaries were headed south and the adrenalin rush when I saw the first cheque of the four thousand and more,was pissed when it was slashed by half. The situation was becoming so untenable that one had to worry when Lambertin would start charging us to stay employed. Once the job permit was cancelled, only a madman would stay behind in Suadi Arabia ,to be caught and thrashed by their police, whose ass we were trying to protect from the manniaakk.
Men stood in line for the severence package, "four weeks pay....some frigging package, mafucking paper" somebody said,and the plane fare home .Adrian handled the HR and I sat in the same room and had no reason to stand in line but I had to symbolically convey, after all my genius, I was just another expendable cog in his opportunist machine. When I reached his table he pushed me away , I hassled him further and thrust my papers in his face and said
"Why ,here's your your new slogan 'NOW FIRING'"
He brushed it off and asked me to fuck off.In Amman, when I had applied for the job with Lambertin, Adrian was the one of the three men at the recruiting centre.We had to fill in a questionaire and tick little boxes and one question asked was, why we wanted to work for an army contractor. I found the responses not worthy of reply, no infiltrator was going to publish his intentions, so I wrote that I loved firewoks.Adrian said he liked that and had passed on my paper after stamping his approval. Now he had further plans for me , so it seemed, for a measly three hundred a week, maybe licking his behind. All jobs had been taken over by the army and civilians were being run out for security reasons , so that left us with little else to do.
'Operation Desert shield had morphed into Desert Storm" and mid January , it was all over. I had always likened the war to a boxing match, where I stood at a corner throwing brave punches in the air, leading with the left, one to the head, an uppercut to chin followed by fast jabs to the body and then a mighty hook to the temple, while a ten armed tyson stood at the other corner, two arms dropped loosely on his sides, other sledgehammer like fists lay hidden behind , waiting for for the referree to blow the whistle. The rest is history, August to Feb, and I was hanging by a thread.
