Department Head Rawlings
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Department Head Rawlings is a fictional columnist for the satirical newspaper The Onion. As of March 2007, there have been six articles "written" by Dept. Head Rawlings.
Rawlings is the head of the "Department for Special Acquistions and Liquidations" (DSAL). Rawlings' columns take the form of his briefing a team of spies, scientists, and soldiers of fortune for various missions in what he terms "The Great Game". While an exact mission statement of the DSAL has thus far not been revealed, they seem to be concerned with espionage, assassinations, weapons of mass destruction, and secret international relations. Before ascending to head of the DSAL, Rawlings was a "station-keeper" in Halifax. His predecessor was the uncle of one of the DSAL's members.
Several members of the DSAL are mentioned throughout Rawlings' articles: Hardin, The Dutchman, Pierre, The Fader, Mei Ling, Klaus, Morgan, Samandrea, Broadbranch, Alexei, Molyneaux, Ben, Quinn, Sidney, Mr. Rosewood, Sergei, MacNeill, Boris, Bertie, Forbish, the Acting Director, the Staff Council, Herr Professor-Doktor Steinesser, the (unnamed) new senior applied-science director and his wife Susan, Alexandrova, Mr. Bisson, and Jack Quetch. Each person is an expert in various realms of covert operations or science.
Several of the department's previous missions have also been mentioned: Tunisia, Johannesburg, Riyadh '99, Nepal '83, an unidentified "November gambit", Project Yggdrasil, Laramie, the engineered eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in Luzon, and a failed mission in Spain, labeled the "Barcelona debacle", which is the focus of the first and third articles. In addition, the second article focuses on a mission to cover-up the disappearance of "Rasputin", an Uzbekistani "orbital kinetic-energy weapon platform".
The existence of Rawlings' "estranged but brilliant" half-brother Paladiev is revealed in the third article, as is his mastermining of the "Barcelona debacle." Paladiev is the son of Rawlings' father and a young shepherdess (and, later, colonel of Soviet intelligence), who was killed in the Mt. Pinatubo eruption. Rawlings' father abandoned the pregnant shepherdess and was able to escape back to his wife, who was pregnant with Rawlings. This abandonment led Paladiev's mother to instill in her son the "sly and shameful rules of the Great Game". Paladiev returns in the sixth article, having undergone genome transfer and becoming engaged to Mei-Ling, Rawling's aide-de-camp. Rawlings orders Mr. Bisson to seduce and assasinate him.
Although the first three articles are loosely tied together, the fourth and fifth ones have focused on the existence and subsequent testing of a rogue "Thanatos device" labeled "Thanatos Tertius", the third of such devices (the other two are controlled by the DSAL). This event led to the forced resignation and retirement of Bertie (whose title within the DSAL wasn't revealed), and Rawlings ordering Jack Quetch to kill the unnamed new senior applied-science director because of the depth of his knowledge of such a device.
